Maintaining great internal communications within your business is always a challenge. No matter the industry, it is often difficult to keep an entire team on the same page. The pandemic and subsequent rise of remote working only increased the difficulties. Now teams are scattered across many different offices and home-offices. Even if your firm was not a multi-site operation before, chances are it is now.
At Chrome, we’ve got years of experience keeping multi-site businesses working at their best. From communications to connectivity and security. There’s a lot to consider and we’d like to think that we’ve considered it all. Here is our guide to keeping your multi-site business connected.
Work with business-grade connectivity
It is risky not to have business-grade communication tools, but it is even more dangerous to be working on a network that can’t support your operation. Whether it is an aging office connection, slow home WiFi or potentially insecure public networks, multi-site teams need to have a unified approach to connectivity.
The way around this is to use a business grade broadband solution. As businesses, we are using an increasing amount of connected devices, and our speeds of up to 80mbps can help keep you working at your best. We also offer connections designed specifically for remote areas. So if one or more of your team are working further afield or in a very rural area, you can still stay connected.
For an unbeatable business connection, we’d recommend a Fibre Leased Line connection. These services provide an unbeatable connection, regardless of location or usage statistics in your area. These connections are ideal for multi-site businesses who also need to maintain critical business systems such as VPNs or websites.
Create a BYOD culture
Businesses need to be adaptable now more than ever. It is impossible to predict when we may need to next work from home or away from the office. Not just due to Covid19, but other circumstances such as poor weather or power outages can make one of your sites inaccessible.
Multi-site businesses can benefit from creating a more flexible environment. Adopting a unified communications service means that your team can access their calls, video conferences, messages, and files from a device of their choice. This means that professional communications and collaboration can happen, no matter the business environment.
It also enables you to turn your offices into work hubs. Meaning staff from any site can drop in and out whenever it suits them. Many businesses are already seen the collaboration potential that this model has. This accessible way of working allows you to better prioritise the productivity and wellbeing of your staff, without sacrificing customer service. CRM integration means that wherever your staff work, they can still provide customers with a fantastic experience.
For that more personal touch, video conferencing can provide a great way to maintain collaboration. This allows you to maintain a face-to-face connection with staff, no matter the office that you work in. Our UC service also includes useful screen and file sharing services which work across multiple devices.
Manage and route calls to help each branch
We know that a flexible work environment doesn’t suit every industry. For the teams with a more permanent office set-up, we’d recommend investing in a call management solution. These allow you to get a better understanding of your business network and better support teams across each of your premises.
Our call management platforms allow you to see which of your sites experience the busiest call times, which teams are the quickest at handling calls and who could use a little bit of extra support. This data is sent to you in a report that prioritises the statistics you need in a manageable and easy-to-understand dashboard.
These stats can help to inform the decisions you make moving forwards. If you know that one of your branches is inundated with calls at 9am on a Monday, you can set your system to automatically route some of those calls to users in other branches. Call routing allows you to take the pressure off your staff while ensuring every customer is heard. Customers will not be able to tell the difference and there is no change in number.
Call routing can also be used by teams to connect with users who are working outside of the office. Calls can be automatically routed from an operators deskphone to their mobile if they are working on the go. Once again there is no change in number or call quality for the caller. This is incredibly valuable for teams in industries like property and real estate, whose agents will constantly be working remotely.
We hope that this guide will help your multi-site business to thrive. Whether you’re a large enterprise, or just looking to implement some more flexible policies, these services can help. To find out more, get in touch with our team at 03333 212 707.
