How Smart Companies Protect Themselves from Economic Uncertainty

Practical Initiatives to Shield Yourself from Financial Headwinds

Vertical is all about delivering content that guides and navigates you through the confusing world of communications technology. Our goal is to help you find clever ways to gain efficiency advantages and give your business an edge. We provide education on the research, purchase, install, and upgrade process. We dole out tips, secrets, and advice that will help you alleviate common pain points. And we’ll give you important insight into trends and the future of the industry.

In this uncertain economic environment, however, we want to step back and simply help you find savings. Because we’re all looking at persistent inflation and high energy prices. Income growth is weak and, with falling confidence in the economy, there are tighter financial conditions. It seems that every day a new technology company is experiencing deep layoffs. In this context, you’re looking for efficiencies that can deliver both short- and long-term savings. You want to ensure that your business is recession-proof. And you need to add flexibility to your business that will allow you to withstand uncertainty. We’re here to help. Here are some proven strategies to bring down your bills and see the real financial gains that you need in today’s economy.

#1 Save Money on Your Existing Telephone System

It’s becoming more and more difficult to deliver on all the technology needs of your business. This makes it crucial to wisely find IT savings where you can. We often encourage companies to start by looking at their services and vendors to frequently find major savings. That’s a great place to start. But with the advancement of telephone technology in the last decade, you’ll also want to take a look and discover hard-cost savings in your infrastructure.

Telephone Cabling – Many companies are limited by the cables running through older buildings. Older telephone cables are typically CAT3 and not designed for data transmission. Don’t let this stop you from accessing the savings of VOIP telephony! New technology allows you to make your business communications current with minimal investment by delivering VOIP-speed data over your existing cabling.

PRI Circuits – It’s getting tougher to rely on multi-line Primary Rate Interface (PRI) circuits for your office telephony. Hardware and support are expensive and increasingly rare. Even when it works, the technology is not internet compatible. The bottom line? You can save money with enhanced technology, such as SIP trunks and hosted cloud telephony.

POTS – Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) is your traditional copper telephone service. It has been popular for decades because it just works. However, there’s an industry-wide transition away from this technology. In fact, lines that used to be sold at $19­–20 now cost over $90. And they’re not going down. You can reduce that cost by half with digital alternatives—alternatives that include capabilities like international calling, transfers, and directories which are added expenses with POTS.

#2 Save Money by Moving Your Phones to the Cloud

Like most IT services, telephony is trending towards the cloud. And with good reason. Companies are finding that cloud-hosted phone services can provide tailored solutions, without the on-site support visits or outages that can lead to ballooning unexpected expenses. It’s more secure and enables you the flexibility to take advantage of the savings of a remote or hybrid workforce.

Cloud telephone solutions give your employees the freedom to take calls, send messages, and collaborate on any device. They’re no longer tied to their desks. But did you know that Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) can also help you cut your phone bill quite dramatically?

• Many of the services and features that are tacked on to your current bill as add-ons are included. This includes things like unlimited local and long-distance calling, calls between offices, and automated voicemail.
• You can consolidate your video conferencing and messaging into one platform, cutting out those vendor costs altogether!
• There are no up-front equipment costs. Moreover, your vendor handles the technology, ensuring that help and changes are only a click or call away, saving you expensive IT staffing costs.

#3 Save Money by Improving Customer Experience

An improved customer experience is not just about building better sales relationships; it can also result in real savings! The same strategies that help you delight customers will also create efficiencies:

• Reduce the cost-per-call by giving customer service agents the tools to direct calls faster and have the right answers at their fingertips.
• Maximize your agent workforce by reducing data entry, creating efficient scheduling, and helping your CX team become more efficient.
• A better customer experience leads directly to enhanced customer loyalty; loyalty that will drive increased sales, independent of other economic factors.

Those savings extend even further when you look at taking your Contact Center or Call Center to the cloud. Many of the services that are costing you extra (such as call management, workforce optimization, channel integration, etc.) are now automated. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is a fast-developing technology with a near-constant release of new features and capabilities. And don’t worry about being priced out—because of strong competition in the market, we’re actually seeing the costs for these services go down.

#4 Save Money by Looking Beyond Telephony

Communications technology is not limited to the phone… and neither are the potential savings. There are numerous ways to look at new or enhanced technology to help you reduce risks and make your business more efficient and effective.

Cybersecurity as a Service – The average cost of a data breach worldwide is $3.92 million. The average data breach cost in the U.S. is $8.19 million. And the average size of a data breach is 25,575 records. The risks are real. The good news is you don’t need a separate vendor to protect yourself, but you do need to review with your provider and make sure that key safety elements are included in your service. Check out our tips for what to look for.

New SD-WAN Technology – Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) allow businesses to securely connect geographically dispersed users, data centers, and endpoints into a contiguous network that doesn’t rely on any single carrier or type of connection. The technology is highly reliable and can be accessed anywhere—at a much lower cost than past private network connection solutions (like MPLS, leased lines, etc). Bonus: New technology in this space has led to much more functionality and easier implementation.

New Cellular Technology – If you haven’t looked at creating a resilient or redundant network environment, now is the time! The most likely outage that your business is going to see is at the local or regional network level. For next to nothing, you can get back-up cellular so that when the network around you goes down, you can still access your crucial business tools. And with 4G and 5G technology, it’s incredibly effective.

Vertical Can Help

The bottom line is that at Vertical, we’re looking out for you. Our goal is to always help you find ways to help your company gain an edge by delivering game-changing new communications solutions that help your business move forward while providing savings to help you run lean and efficiently. We can help you implement any of the savings opportunities above, and even work with you to find other opportunities in your business environment. Instead of blanketly recommending cookie-cutter products, we partner with each customer to find solutions that work uniquely for them.

And when it comes to surviving economic uncertainty, you can trust us because we’ve been there. We’ve built a decades-long track record of delivering great communications solutions. Our intricate design and implementation process is time-tested and our technicians are incredibly experienced—they boast over 974 combined years in the industry! That means that we’re here for you now and we’ll still be here for years to come. And that kind of certainty is the most important thing to look for in this economy. Do you want to shore up and recession-proof your communications? Reach out today!