Businesses of all sizes face communication issues from time to time. The challenge facing small and medium companies are often greater as they just don’t have the resources necessary to completely tackle the problem. Not having the right resources in place has only aggravated the risk from potential communication problems.

These issues can range from customers being unable to easily reach the correct member of staff they need, through to your employees having difficulty communicating with their fellow colleagues. Here’s our advice on identifying common communication issues for small and medium size businesses – and how to get over those issues.

Slow decision making slowing down everything

Whether it’s staff waiting for replies from managers, teams searching for suitable meeting times or employees waiting for information from various departments, businesses often underestimate the time employees waste simply waiting for replies or information from someone else. You should try and minimise such downtime like this as much as possible.

One way to overcome this is to implement a good conference calling system. Virtual meetings and conference calls will help teams working from home or widely distributed meet and collaborate on projects, leading to quicker decision making and improving overall workflow.

Missing calls

Missed calls are the bane of many small and medium size businesses. Each one represents a potential missed opportunity such as lost sales, loss of customer trust or a vital piece of information for a project being missed. If it keeps happening, customers will lose faith in your firm and go elsewhere. Do your staff regularly miss calls because they’re away from their desk?

Call groups is one way around the issue. Sometimes customers are not looking for a specific member of staff to solve their issue. Anyone in the team – whether sales, service or admin – can help them. So allow any free staff member to answer the call instead of routing it to a specific extension.

The multi-device ring feature is yet another effective solution. It allows staff to add multiple devices to ring – in a chain or in parallel – when a call comes in. The person can answer on the closest device, instead of running back to their desk.

Lack of contact with remote employees

Working from home is the norm for millions of us at the moment, but it can add communication problems. You don’t want employees working remotely to feel forgotten or be left out of important projects, so how can you ensure that doesn’t happen?

Video chats and virtual meetings can ensure everyone stays in touch and you won’t miss the visual cues you might get during an in-person meeting. Regular emails and phone calls to check in can also help.

Equations has a number of communications solutions including VoIP and hosted phone systems that can help you and your team stay in touch during the pandemic and be flexible enough to meet your ever-changing needs. If you’d like to learn more, give us a call on 01237 420010.