In your personal life, communication is instant. It arrives in a text, an email, or a direct message on an app seconds after sending. At work, communication is often slow and expensive, and collaboration is far from simple.

Many of the same technologies that you use to keep up with friends and family are available in more advanced forms for your business. So why are you still overspending on outdated communication tools?

What Communication Tools Do Businesses Need?

For most companies, the needs boil down to a minimum of three products:

• Phone service
• Messaging services (email and/or intranet)
• Collaborative customer/case management tools

There are two powerful tools available that simplify these communications: VoIP and Microsoft 365.

With VoIP, you can do more than make calls at a lower cost-per-call, you can also:

• Host multiple callers for voice & video conference calls
• Send calls to alternative devices
• Forward messages and voicemails to colleagues

That’s not the end. VoIP offers dozens of other pro-business features.

With VoIP, you have phone service, messaging service, and collaboration tools — all in one technology.

3 Reasons Outdated Communication Tools Harm Your Business

Many businesses prefer to stick to what they know.. Their phone system has served them well in the past, but there are real issues with continuing to rely on outdated communication technologies:

1. They’re expensive.
2. They’re limited to in-office use.
3. They offer only basic features.

The old tools no longer offer the capacity to scale or the flexibility in finance to remain effective. They won’t work at home when your employees can’t come into the office.

By upgrading, you do more than invest in new technology. You streamline processes, lower recurring costs, and enjoy productivity boosts offered by better features.

Can Your Current Communication and Collaboration System do All This?

Microsoft has been working to steadily add efficiency and functionality to its Teams solution. For those that have never used Teams, it is the one communication and collaboration platform that syncs seamlessly with your Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) tools.

Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to:

• Record meetings and group calls for future reference
• Sync files across your devices
• Integrate with your Outlook email
• Maintain ISO 27001 and SSAE16 SOC cybersecurity standards
• Integrate third-party apps such as Zendesk for workflow automations
• Collaborate seamlessly with individuals and businesses outside your company
• Utilize any device
• Collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations in real time
• Reduce the amount of email clutter via internal direct messaging

The Echelon team has helped dozens of businesses move from consumer-grade, insecure collaboration platforms to secure and compliant enterprise tools like Microsoft Teams.

The Time to Upgrade is Now

Communication is now collaborative and instant, and small businesses can enjoy the benefits of the same technologies that their enterprise competitors use (including cloud services, VoIP, and collaborative software) while simultaneously improving their security.

Echelon can help your organization move away from outdated communication tools by implementing and managing technologies that will help you meet the modern expectations of your employees and customers.