Avoid the train chaos by becoming a mobile business

For the past month or two, train chaos has hit the headlines, with commuters and in turn, their businesses, hit hard by network failures, timetable changes and cancellations.

At its peak, hundreds of trains per day have been cancelled, leaving commuters and consumers alike stranded and frustrated.

There’s no doubt that public transport plays a huge role in business’ productivity, as well as workers’ home-life balance. Many are late to work, or unable to reach the office at all, and can get home so late that it’s pretty much straight to bed.

Your business, particularly if it’s in a heavily-affected area like London or the North West, needs to mitigate the risks posed to your productivity and ultimately your bottom line. Thankfully, readily-available technologies allow you to do this without a large upfront CapEx and give you the ability to predict the cost per user.

Take your telephone system for example. It’s something that pretty much every business needs. Whether you rely heavily on your telephone systems to communicate with suppliers or just need a way for your customers to contact you, it’s a must-have rather than a luxury. Although live chat and chatbots are on the rise, 61% of customers prefer to call a business when they’re ready to purchase, and 59% want to talk to a real person (Google).

By opting for a hosted telephony solution, you’re not only implementing a business-critical system, you’re giving your staff the option of mobility. Thanks to cloud hosting, employees can be available anytime, anywhere. In this digital-first world, customer demand dictates that your business should be available at most times. People expect immediate answers.

Many employees have an externally-available desk phone number that customers, suppliers and partners alike can reach them on. You can tether that number to your mobile phone so that all calls automatically route to your mobile handset. Whilst it’s true that this could also be achieved through company mobiles, that’s a significantly higher cost with the handsets and contracts. Plus, if your colleagues travel internationally, tethering their desk phone to their mobile doesn’t cost extra, whilst roaming charges might. By adopting a hosted telephony solution, you can roll this functionality into something you’ll use every day.

Users can also dictate the outgoing number that appears when they make calls, further giving the impression that they’re stationed at the office rather than at their kitchen table, on a bus or even on the loo (please don’t do this).

Mobility isn’t just important in the face of impossible commutes; we were able to support and communicate with our customers with minimal disruption during March’s snowstorm, thanks to technologies like hosted telephony. Should any phone lines or power grids go down, you’re still operational and contactable. You can’t prevent disasters, but you can prepare for them.

With more workers than ever working from home, and our work-ready millennial generation favouring businesses that allow flexible working. Employees who work from home ranked their productivity as 7.7/10 compared to 6.5/10 for office-based workers. The number of people working from home has risen by over 152,000 in the past year alone. 41% of our colleagues at TSG are home-based, which wouldn’t be possible without technologies like Gamma telephony and Office 365.

If you want to know more about the mobility element of hosted telephony solutions, you can sign up to our bitesize webinar, which we’re hosting over the next couple of months. We’re also hosting a webinar to show you the disaster recovery capabilities afforded by VoIP.

With all of this in mind, the question is: why wouldn’t you make your business mobile?