Ready for Business Thriving through continuous disruption.

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”

– Rupert Murdoch

Rapid change is now the norm in this growing digital economy. And rapid adaptation to changes that have already taken place is no longer enough. Businesses big and small have to continually anticipate changes and respond before those changes occur to stay ahead of their competitors.

But small businesses have a distinct advantage over their larger and less nimble competitors if they can learn how to anticipate changes and adjust their business models accordingly.

Since the onset of the pandemic last year, small businesses have been refocusing their efforts and doubling down on digital communications as a way to respond to the sudden shift to a highly contactless way of doing business with their customers. To be clear, customer demand was already shifting towards digital communications and ecommerce thanks to a significant demographic shift, with millennials and younger demographics preferring digital options for everything from purchasing to service to communications. The pandemic only accelerated this trend and created a cross-generational shift that challenged businesses to adapt traditional business models in order to provide their goods and services in new and innovative ways.

As early as 2019, and even before that, studies were already demonstrating the need for small businesses to embrace digital transformation as a way to not only survive but to edge out their competition. Any hesitation related to embracing digital transformation subsided in early 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. And now that the dust is settling, technology is poised to drastically alter the playing field for small businesses as we enter the next economic boom cycle.

“Between six to eight million businesses are started each year, and a majority of them are building their businesses on the cloud,” noted Yancey Spruill, CEO of DigitalOcean, in a recent Forbes article about technology and small business. “The widespread availability of tech infrastructure like cloud computing has lowered barriers of entry for entrepreneurs, regardless of their background or expertise. Technologies supporting remote work also make it easier for these founders to acquire talent outside their immediate geographic areas.”

Armed with the right technology, small businesses are nimble enough to use this technology to adapt but also to predict and preempt changes. For one, because of its size, a small business can pivot quickly in response to anticipated change. The barriers which previously prevented this, both the constraint of a physical location and the expenses associated with starting and running a business, leaving them with the resources they need to continuously innovate to service existing customers and to recruit new customers.

What’s more, small businesses are so much closer to their customers, and the one-on-one interactions allow them to anticipate potential changes early. Because they get direct feedback from those customers, businesses are able to process that feedback and make quick changes to accommodate changing preferences, which also opens the door to acquiring new customers.

And there is no longer any doubt that the right technology must be cloud-based. With business operating from virtually anywhere and with teams and customers that can span a region, a country or even the globe, cloud-based technologies are the only ones that can meet the demands of operating from anywhere and at scales that suit businesses small to large.

In 2001, a group of software developers decided that rigid framework being used to collect requirements, iterate software releases and get new applications and features to market was slowing down innovation, was not responding well enough to what customers really wanted and was not adapting to changes quickly enough. They resolved to improve on this by creating the Agile Manifesto for software development, which quickly inspired a revolution in development methodologies that are commonplace today.

The idea was simple: remove the barriers to flexibility and innovation, so that we can get things to market faster. The agile methodology has been expanded to other disciplines, and has helped businesses and organizations to rapidly change, adapt and deliver innovation.

Businesses now need to bring the agile methodology to their hiring practices as well. A traditional hiring model relies largely on hiring local talent to work in a specific geographic location, and even recruiting talent from outside the area but having them move to that geographic location. Not anymore. With businesses going virtual, so does talent that can now be recruited from practically anywhere. This means changing both the approach your business takes to hiring employees and providing more flexibility on who you choose.

According to RecruiterBox, hiring remote employees has a number of key advantages:

• Reduced office costs
• A limitless talent pool
• Increased productivity
• Increased employee happiness and retention

While this provides your business access to recruit top talent without geographic boundaries, it also helps to have a geographically dispersed team in the event of local or even regional events like natural disasters that may compromise employees’ ability to get work done. A geographically dispersed workforce provides better business continuity.

Employees in new locales also offer an opportunity to expand to those markets, maintaining office hours in local time zones and supporting local languages.

Effective internal and external communications is key to business success and growth. If there’s one thing many businesses learned after the onset of the pandemic, it’s that legacy on-premises communications platforms can’t adapt to the rapid transition to remote work and remote business operation.

That left a lot of businesses scrambling to find better solutions, leading to a surge in adoption of cloud communications solutions because they were cost effective and quick and easy to deploy. With little time to evaluate and form a strategy, however, many companies opted for different vendors for their calling, messaging and video conferencing needs, leaving them with a longer term headache. Disparate vendors come at an additional cost, the burden of managing multiple systems and an inconsistent experience for users who had to juggle multiple apps and user interfaces.

With the economy poised to boom again, band-aid communications solutions can conspire to inhibit a business’s ability to stay ahead of the ongoing rapid disruption in this digital economy. A longer term strategy to ensure your small business can compete successfully is needed. Consolidation of all a business’ communications needs to a single vendor is a strong step in the right direction. Per a recent webinar and analysis from Metrigy, moving to a single communications vendor leads to:

• An increase in employee productivity
• A decrease in operational costs
• Improved utilization of UCC apps
• Higher employee ratings of the technology IT delivers

Lower costs and higher productivity leads to increased engagement from your teams and a far better overall experience for your customers. Being able to move conversations quickly from chat to a call, or from a call to a video conference all while retaining context removes the disjointed experience that comes with disjointed communications solutions, allowing your teams to work better and to provide the best customer experience possible. All this while providing the highest levels of security, availability and scalability.

8x8 is a market leader in offering a complete suite of integrated communications capabilities that are secure, reliable and can scale from companies of 10 to 10,000 users. To win in this digital economy, your business needs a communications vendor they can partner with and depend on, so that you can focus on what matters most: your business.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore how scalability is being reinvented by cloud communications, and how this can help your small business expand and grow.

Chapter 7: Reinvent scalability