According to research reported by Retail Times in February, 29% of small businesses in the UK retail sector feared that they would contract or collapse in the upcoming three months. Hospitality and leisure firms were especially distraught, with 53% predicting a similar fate for them for that period.
If the COVID crisis is continuing to nibble away at your company’s financial resources, you may sadly need to start thinking about scaling down the business just to keep it in one piece. If even your corporate telecoms are seemingly at stake, here is how you could start to sensibly streamline them.
Keep all of your company’s stakeholders in the loop
These people would include employees, shareholders and other people who have a financial interest in your business. If its financial situation is calling for cutbacks, you could let stakeholders know this and ask them for advice or ideas concerning how you could rein back your telecoms expenditure.
In a Forbes article, Sherrin Ross Ingram of the International Centre for Strategic Planning warns: “The leadership that scaled too quickly is often too personal and, perhaps, financially invested in what has occurred to have clarity about the viability of the vision”. That’s why you need objective insights.
Assess your firm’s entire technology portfolio
The question of precisely what technology should be classed as “telecoms” and what shouldn’t is a tricky one to answer. These days, your company’s telecoms system probably isn’t exactly isolated from the rest of your business tech; on the contrary, the two could be closely interconnected.
One Information Age article advocates the practice of Technology Business Management (TBM), where “leaders assign value to technology products and services which accounts for their relative costs, and align these with the wider business strategy”. It’s about learning how you can spend wiser, not harder.
Consider how you can cost-effectively meet customers’ goals
Basically, what do your customers want to achieve? The answer – or answers – should drive your choices of which of your telecom services to axe and which to prioritise keeping.
For example, if you think many of your customers would want to reach out to you outside your usual work hours, you could have professional greeting and call routing menus implemented by Voco, a telecoms company offering flexible options you could easily scale down as your company’s trajectory requires. All the while, though, you can continue to protect the customer experience.
Rebuild your telecoms for the long-term future
Many businesses have taken a serious hit since the pandemic first started to seriously bite last year. Still, one lingering problem is that, even as vaccine rollouts begin to alleviate the current crisis, you just can’t be certain whether – or perhaps simply when – your firm will be similarly struck again.
For this reason, now would be an especially good time for you to rebuild your corporate telecoms system with flexibility and resilience at its heart. That way, if another, pandemic-sized crisis does hit, this system will hopefully have the required fluidity to at least somewhat cushion the shock.