Most of the time, we talk about the relationship between a business and the consumer and the need to maintain open lines of communication between these two entities. But we can’t forget the vital communications that have to occur between business to business services. Without proper communication between all parties, the chain of services will break down and no one will reap any benefits, least of all the consumer.
Business to business services communication can be about a number of things. From supply chain management to requesting professional services to be performed, these are all potentially time-sensitive topics that can require immediate attention, and thus, effective communication.
However, what’s a business to do when it doesn’t have the resources to have someone constantly by the phone making these requests and acting as the intermediary between the different parties?
That’s where automated and digital communications comes in.
Digital faxing saves time
Hard copy messages are harder to ignore when someone has it physically in their hand, which is why fax communication is still a valuable communication method between businesses.
When a business has to send multiple copies of the same message to various suppliers and has to feed it into a fax machine each time, it can get pretty time-consuming. With the ability to send faxes digitally, this greatly reduces the overall time spent hovering over a fax machine. In fact, with digital faxing, there’s no need to stand over a fax machine at all!
With the right software, businesses can create and send their faxes directly from a computer to the recipients’ fax machines. The software can also send the faxes in batches all at once to recipients instead of one at a time, ensuring that the fax is sent and received in a timely manner to all parties.
Businesses can then go into the reports for the fax and see at a glance which recipients received the fax successfully as well as any failures.
Live polling gets immediate responses
Sometimes communication from a business to business services could be as simple as a quick question for delivery confirmation or to ask whether they are able to supply a certain product. Instead of calling up each service to ask the question (and have the conversation ultimately continue for far longer than necessary), a business can use a digital polling tool to automatically send the question out to all business services simultaneously. The poll question can either be created as an open-ended question or as a multiple choice question with a set list of response options recipients can choose from.
With the live polling tool, businesses are able to send these questions out via multiple communication channels – such as email, voice, and SMS. This helps to ensure a speedy response from the recipient so that the sender can take its next steps quickly and efficiently. Responses appear in the report for the notification in near-real-time so the business can gather all the information it needs almost immediately.
Automated campaigns run in the background
A lot of business to business services communication is sending notices and reminder messages out quite regularly at scheduled intervals, such as on a monthly or quarterly basis. Manually sending out these similar, if not identical messages every single time is not that efficient, right?
An automated communications platform can help businesses set up and run communication campaigns that send regular messages automatically without much (or any) manual intervention at all other than the initial campaign setup. This will free up resources while still getting the business the responses it needs as well as maintaining the all-important open lines of communication.
An automated communications platform allows users to set up workflows that are inter-connected, allowing for contacts (i.e. the other businesses) to progress through the flow automatically, sending them down a specific path in the campaign depending on their actions and interactions.
For example, a business can create a campaign that will send an initial message via email and, depending on if the recipients open the email or not within a specified number of days, they will automatically receive a reminder email. On the other hand, if the recipients do open the email, they will not receive the reminder, instead being put into a delay until the next regularly scheduled email message is due to be sent.
Looking to facilitate business to business services communication?
SimplyCast’s all-in-one engagement automation platform can help businesses improve and manage their business to business services communication efforts by providing the necessary tools to send faxes digitally, gather information via quick polls, and create sophisticated automated communication campaigns that can run in the background of businesses’ normal operations.
If you are interested in signing up for a demo of the SimplyCast solution to see how all this is possible, be sure to click the button below!
