With a view to enhancing workplace productivity, streamlining communication and reducing travel costs, many companies have looked toward technology to offer plausible and realistic solutions that are easy to adopt and deploy long term. While phone communication is ubiquitous and email communication remains popular, both demonstrate subtle disadvantages. Phone calls leave no paper trail and email does not function in real time. Inter-office messengers, or business messengers as they are also called, seamlessly combine the benefits of trackable record keeping and live interaction by offering a highly cost effective communication solution for the global workplace. Let us take a few moments to see how this technology works and how your organization may benefit from it.
What is an Inter-office Messenger?
Inter-office messengers are closed circuit text-based instant messaging (IM) applications installed within organizations to enable employees communicate with one another. Think of an inter-office messenger as Google Talk or MSN Chat designed exclusively for office use with at least one hundred features built in. You can send and receive text messages much like on demand live chat, send large files including multimedia content through file transfer, and generate and archive message transcripts. Your employees can log into their accounts much like the way they log into their email accounts and send text messages of unlimited length. Many inter-office messengers permit the use of emoticons and smileys, screen sharing for collaborative projects and co-browsing of specific web pages. These features help to improve the overall quality of workplace communication. They not only make it possible for your colleagues to connect across continents, but also retrieve relevant communication if the right permissions have been set by the admin team. There are other ways in which inter-office messengers improve communication and these are little talking points you should explore when arriving at a decision regarding which application to finally choose:
Beyond LAN and WAN Enablement
Many business messengers restrict themselves to LAN, WAN or VPN implementation with no direct Internet connectivity. While the technology exists to connect the application to the Internet backbone or a high speed data pipe, organizations are reluctant to do so owing to privacy concerns. This prevents office locations, which are not connected to the LAN or Wan, from using the inter-office application. Look for only those applications that are fully IP enabled where privacy concerns are being addressed using 256 bit SSL cryptology. Using such an application is much like scoring two home runs with a single strike. You get the best of both worlds– a data security blanket much like banks and other financial institutions, and total connectivity of all your employees.
Inter-office Messaging on the go
Considering the extensive amount of time during which your colleagues, especially your sales force, remains mobile, select an inter-office messenger which facilitates mobile connectivity. Mobile apps are now available for all the major platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows. Your business messenger should support at least iOS and Android platforms for maximum adoption.
2-dimentional Customer Support
Select an Inter-office messenger which allows you to activate two windows simultaneously, the first window to run your live chat application to communicate with your customers, and a second window to communicate through the inter-office messenger. Your customer service and chat reps can easily consult with colleagues in order to answer a customer query for which an answer is not immediately available.
Built in Productivity Tools
Some inter-office messengers go well beyond simple chat-based office communication. You can send and receive color-coded sticky notes and “paste” them on your desktop with important information. The event scheduler and alarm function ensures that you never miss an important meeting or engagement. You can also access an online calendar with a single mouse click and confirm your presence at meetings or briefing sessions.
Multi-tier IM Communication
Look for a feature rich inter-office messenger that will let you communicate with colleagues one-on-one, with a group, or with the entire company through the broadcast feature. The application should also allow admins to set permissions on individual accounts based on seniority and scope of work. Messages should be archived if you are offline. You should also be able to check to see if a colleague is online before sending a communication.
Scalability and Modular Design
Office productivity tools designed for enterprise-wide deployment always come with a few maintenance and record keeping headaches. Your admins should be able to set permissions, update status, add new employees to the network, and delete the accounts of former employees without having to donate an arm and a leg. The entire process of updating the network should not impact the application’s overall speed and performance benchmarks. You can obtain performance and usage stats by reading independent third party reviews and by visiting forums and blog comments with a quick Google search.
Picking the right messaging solution for your organization isn’t going to be easy especially if your organization is large with employees who have diverse needs and expectations. Work closely with solution providers, tell them about your requirements and invest in an extended free trial downloads. Platform switches and adoptions invariably come with teething pains. However, the end results are usually satisfying because everyone likes a gift horse that performs well.