Patrick Foster from Ecomm Tips - 27 February, 2019 - 5 ’ read

The top communication challenges facing enterprise brands.

Cloud, Collaboration Tools, Communication, Enterprise

E-commerce Consultant at Ecomm Tips, Patrick Foster presents an overview of the issues that companies have to face when reaching the enterprise level, providing a few insights to overcome them constructively.

Scaling up to the enterprise level is tricky.

Handling the major rise in communication requirements is particularly tough. What are the biggest challenges to expect? More money, more problems: so, the common adage goes. And while it’s typically applied to the personal wealth of celebrities, it may hold more significance in the world of big business — the more you grow a company, and the more revenue it yields, the more difficulties spring up to sap your time and cause you frustration.

At a fundamental level, communication is the key to resolving this frustration, because an enterprise-level business is inherently modular. It may have begun as a one-person operation, but now it has a leader, and a managerial level, and a formidable set of employees… and then there are the clients and partners to factor in, each with unique requirements.

Without good communication, it’s all but impossible to keep a business of this type operating smoothly. But good communication isn’t easy to achieve in the enterprise world. Let’s take a look at the top communication challenges facing enterprise brands today.

Keeping everything appropriately secured.

How many internet-capable devices play into the daily operations of a modern enterprise-level business? Hundreds? Possibly even thousands? Most in the hands of employees, but some belonging to associates (or even family members) and featuring varying levels of access. One of the biggest fears that follows the looming IoT pertains to the security threat inherent to having so many different devices communicating automatically.

If you’re running an SME, then you can closely monitor the devices you use — sourcing them from a single provider, updating them at the same time, and ensuring that you know where they are (and who has them) at all times. But when you reach the enterprise level, that kind of control becomes nigh-impossible to maintain.

This is where broad cloud integration becomes so valuable. By routing everything from every type of advice through one secure system (like using a workplace VPN), you can take a hands-off approach to the hardware without leaving your system unprotected.

Maintaining a high standard of training.

For a large organization to work with minimal friction, the entirety of its staff must possess baseline knowledge of its most important systems. But there’s a problem with this, and it’s twofold: firstly, big companies tend to collect new complex systems on a whim, and secondly, it’s tough to train everyone to a similar level when they have wildly-differing jobs and workloads.

If you let things slip, it won’t be long before you start to run into issues. Perhaps work was assigned to a low-level employee, but they didn’t realize because they’re unfamiliar with the system you’ve asked them to use, having never been suitably trained on it. Or maybe there are those in the company who are fully up-to-speed on a particular tool, but you don’t know about it because they pursued that training of their own volition.

To quote former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.” The unknown unknowns are the enemy, because you can’t address them. The answer? A uniform software portal that can keep track of everything.

Staying connected across disparate schedules.

The internet has done many borderline-magical things, and we so easily forget how remarkable it is to have such flexibility in what we can do. If you don’t feel like working in an office and running a business alongside the person in the next cubicle, you can work from a poolside area (if you have the discipline) while collaborating with a partner living on the other side of the world. Using the right tools, any digital business can approach the enterprise level — no matter the location.

This is wonderful, but also the cause of no shortage of organization headaches. When you can’t rely on your employees, colleagues, partners or clients to maintain the same hours as you, you must find ways to mitigate that lack of reliable overlapping contact time. If you fail to do so, you run the risk of losing touch with what’s happening.

The move from old-fashioned 9-to-5 schedules to 24/7 working options has been great for personal enjoyment of work, but has also made 24/7 support channels practical necessities for big companies. Having a system that can handle requests at any time and ensure that vital information gets where it needs to go is invaluable.

However, whether people work on-site or remotely, as the company grows and reaches the enterprise level, the need for integrated communication tools grows proportionately. At that point, the importance of streamlining and simplifying the usability, deployment and user experience of tools at every level of the organization becomes increasingly evident. Not surprisingly, Imagicle’s greatest strength lies in the integration of an entire set of applications into a single suite, granting a unified, smooth experience from desk phones, communication clients, browsers and mobile devices. In fact, a simple installation, fast support and a single intuitive interface for all users are not just an extra convenience: they are the pillars that allow a company to grow on solid foundations, supported by a consistent and non-dispersive communication.

Scaling services most efficiently.

Scaling to meet enterprise-level demand takes a lot of careful consideration. In Ecommerce, for instance, every extra sale brings extra complexities with it — the prospect of having to deal with a return, the value of turning that buyer into a loyal customer, the need to learn from the experience to optimize for future sales.

And as you scale communication processes, you can rapidly struggle to adjust to the pace in time. How do you achieve quality and consistency when you’re facing hundreds of support requests every day? How can you handle reporting to numerous clients on a weekly basis? In the end, ease-of-use is the most important thing.

Even if you wanted to automate your actual communications, you wouldn’t be able to without seriously compromising the quality — it’ll be a long time before any type of chatbot can compete with a person for in-depth human interaction. But you can use advanced software to make it as easy as possible to get things done, allowing as much time as possible to go towards actually complete meaningful tasks.

Communication is of critical importance to any business, regardless of the size, but it only grows in significance as you expand your operation. To achieve and maintain strong communication standards at the enterprise level, it’s necessary to secure all devices, train everyone accordingly, keep everyone connected, and make it as easy as possible to scale up as needed.

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