Branch communication is hard

Branch-based organisations have to get smarter in targeting their communications if they want to improve compliance and get people out of the back office. Here’s how you can do it with Metro Unified Comms.

If you don’t reach the right people at the right time you run the risk of ragged execution and patchy compliance. So often the tendency is to send information to more people than required ‘just in case’. Given a natural desire not to miss people out it’s not surprising that office workers now spend on average 2.5 hours per day wading through email, with much of it not relevant to them or their role.

Not everyone in branch-based organisations has access to email, but those that do are typically key people like store managers who you preferably would like to be delivering great service and acting as a role model for junior staff – not spending a quarter of their time stuck in the back office. Reducing these people’s back-office time immediately boosts branch performance, service levels and team moral.

We need better targeting

If we want to ensure that people get the messages they need without spamming everyone else and wasting their time, we need to be able to target them better, and this is just one area where email systems fall down and Unified Comms excels.

Distribution lists are a major problem. You’ll have a list of stores and you’ll probably have regional lists. You’ll probably have lists by store type too, but the problem is distribution lists are typically flat and static, and hard to maintain. One particular large retailer we know needs to target stores by department, area and product set, and to do this effectively they wind up having to manage hundreds of different mail groups.

You have three options:

  1. Spam everyone on the basis that those who need to know will wade through streams of messages to find what they need to know. This hurts compliance and kills everyone’s productivity, not only just the people we want to target.
  2. Try and target more finely, but run the risk of missing people because your organisation changes more quickly than you can keep complex lists up to date.
  3. Take a look at Unified Comms.

Unified Comms solves the targeting problem

Unified Comms is designed for messaging across branch-based organisations – it makes it easy to manage complex mixtures of branch, role and almost any other attribute that could make sense to target by.

It’s easy to manage these attributes, and easy to use them too. Want to send a message or task to certain specialists in the southern region stores? A few clicks and it’s done, and you can see exactly who will receive it. (You can even manage compliance too, but that’s for another post.)

The result?

For senders – Fine communication control, with the ability to monitor the whole message lifecycle from sending through receipt to action all the way to compliance and reporting.

For recipients – No more spam. If it’s in your inbox it’s for you, and not hidden in a whole lot of irrelevant messages. In turn, you spend less time trapped in email, and more time engaging with customers and staff.

Would you like to learn more?

Effective targeting is just one-way Unified Comms improves communication in branch-based organisations. Click here, or call us on 02380 816000

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