Small Businesses are Missing Out on Huge Telecoms Savings
When Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992, his campaign manager famously made a sign reading, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The intention was to remind his staff that there was one simple thing that really mattered to the electorate — keeping their incomes safe.
With that in mind, here’s the best business advice you can get: make more money from your customers than it costs to provide your service.
Ok, it’s not groundbreaking. But speak to enough SMEs and you realise that it is worth repeating.
SMEs leave a lot of money on the table, and they don’t always have the human resources to prevent this. As a result, poor cashflow management is the reason behind 82% of small business failures.
Reducing expenditure has always been one of the key ways CircleLoop aims to help SMEs. By making the transition from multiple phone lines to our single fully-integrated system, businesses can expect to save around £60 per head, per month.
To put that into perspective, a five person startup could see a saving of £3600 in the first year alone.
What are the biggest challenges for SMEs?
What kinds of savings are we talking about?
Buying hardware — If you provide each employee with a conventional desk phone, and a smartphone, and they bring their personal phone to work, you have a telephone/human ration of 3/1.
That kind of surplus equipment is a relic of the 20th century office, like the pagers we all threw away in the 90s. If you can run exactly the same functionality of three phones from one phone — and it costs less — why wouldn’t you do exactly that?
Paying line rental and mobile contracts — In addition to securing unnecessary hardware, most businesses are paying significantly over the odds for access to the phone network. It’s bizarre to have separate contracts for mobile and landline phones; you might as well have different suppliers for hot and cold water.
If you want to make life simpler, you can secure all your telephony needs from one supplier that doesn’t ask you to sign a long-term contract.
Working from home to use less office space — There are also secondary cost savings that come from modernising your telephony solution. A lot of SMEs would love it if more of their staff could work off-site and reduce the cost of office space.
Let’s face it, if your office is just a place for staff to answer the phone, you’re putting the cart before the horse. When staff can access their work landline number from any location, the traditional office setup suddenly makes much less sense.
Scale with your business — A simple fact of business: if you want to be able to grow in the future, you need to plan for it now. So ask yourself, will the systems we have in place right now be able to cope if the company doubles in size?
As a business grows there are various costs that escalate, introducing greater risk. So wouldn’t it be great if your telephony solution scaled to fit the business as staff come and go?
Perhaps the most important feature of CircleLoop’s system is that administrators can add or remove users at any time. Because there’s no contract, you can simply hit a button to get a new account or close an old one. You’ll never need to think about buying another dozen desk phones, or renegotiating line rental with your provider.
But we wouldn’t be considered a game-changing enterprise just by helping SMEs to hold on to their cash. The real benefit of CircleLoop is that our service is not only more cost-effective than standard telephony — it’s better.
Get in touch today to find out how CircleLoop can help your business.
