Communication is a crucial cornerstone of business success. It needs to be efficient, goal-oriented, and targeted.
No matter if it's internal discussions about next quarter's sales strategies, meetings with potential partners, or interactions with customers experiencing issues with your product - friction-free business communication is the basis for positive outcomes.
That said, for the best communication practices, you also need the best tools.
Here are five platforms you can harness to elevate communications in your business, become more effective, and boost your overall productivity.
Asynchronous Meetings : Loom
To kick things off, there is Loom, a platform that enables asynchronous meetings.
Virtual meetings are amazing - a life-saver, as we all learned during the pandemic. However, they can be time-consuming and tricky to arrange, especially if you have a global team.
Asynchronous meetings are a great alternative. Platforms like Loom allow you to record your part of a virtual meeting, including screen-shares and the whole shebang, then share it with others.
The recipients can then watch (and re-watch) your recording, skim through the automatic transcript for information, leave comments, or reply with a video of their own.
Cloud-based Business Phone Systems: Nextiva
Next up, there is Nextiva, one of the most popular cloud-based business phone platforms out there. As a modern business phone system, it goes far beyond the technology's traditional desk phone incarnation. Instead, it centralizes various channels of communication and offers a wide array of additional functionalities.
Voice and video calls, messaging, live chat, fax, email - in the past, you had to hop between different platforms to keep track of all of these channels. Now, you have access to all of them in one central portal.
This eliminates data siloing, slashes the chance of missing a message, and cuts back on the hassle of watching out for notifications from half a dozen different apps.
Plus, platforms like Nextiva also come with a handy array of functionalities to make your life easier - from automatic meeting transcripts to integrations with other business platforms.
Project Management: Asana
Another essential tool to facilitate business communications, especially within your team, are project management platforms like Asana.
When you have several projects running in parallel, or multiple people collaborating on the same one, keeping up with tasks and deadlines can be a challenge. And lead to miscommunication.
A solid project management tool can help you avoid this. It lets you add create project goals, add team members, assign tasks and deadlines, share files, and specify dependencies. At a glance, you'll be able to see what the project's status is, and if you need to check in with any team members.
Plus, you can handily visualize project timelines and progress, for instance through calendar or Gantt chart views.
Document Sharing and Collaboration: Google Workspace
How much time do you lose sending files back and forth? Converting them between different formats? Figuring out which version of report_final_final2.docx is actually the latest one?
If the answer is "a lot," you're not alone.
Efficiently sharing and collaborating files is one of the trickiest aspects of business communication.
The best solution? Choose one platform and stick to it. Google Workspace is a prime candidate.
Here, you can create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more, share them, manage permissions, collaborate on edits, leave comments, and make suggestions. Version histories are easy to track.
Plus, Google Workspace is so well-established and intuitive that most people know how to handle it, or can figure it out fast. You don't need to install any local software. And it integrates with a wide variety of other business platforms.
Customer Relationship Management: HubSpot
Customer-facing interactions are one of the most delicate aspects of business communication.
Meeting every (potential) customer who reaches out to you at eye level is crucial, as is making sure they feel heard, and avoiding frustration.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as HubSpot can help you achieve this goal. It centralizes all the information you have about every single customer and prospect and places it at your fingertips whenever you need it.
Say one of your customers is having issues with one of your products or services. So they call your customer service and ask for advice. With a CRM at your disposal, you'll be instantly able to pull all the data you need to help the customer - their original purchase date, all the information on the product they bought, whether they've ever called customer service before, what the outcome of earlier interactions was, and much more.
All this allows your team members to help customers much more efficiently, increasing overall customer satisfaction.
The Bottom Line
Communication is key in business. When you choose which platforms you leverage for your own business communications, take the time to consider carefully.
Using the tools on the list above as a starting point, you'll be able to pinpoint which types of business communication platforms best suit your needs. And which of them have the potential to streamline your workflows to enhance your overall productivity.
