Leadership and Communication in a Virtual World
An essential to stay connected and-to maintain customer and employee relationships
During a time of a public crisis, we cannot control the issues, but can decide how we communicate to those who rely on our businesses. We can choose to respond in a strong, caring, and consistent manner. A company has many interactions and those in our community have distinct needs. Communication is the lifeline for any organization whether it be with employees or with their customers.
Over the past weeks, Simplicity VoIP purposefully implemented a communications plan to extend beyond marketing messages. It has been and continues to be, our goal to be informative, supportive, provide clarity, and to stay connected with our employees, clients, partners, and the greater community.
Our company’s employees are at the heart of our business in maintaining customer relationships. This is especially true during a local emergency or a global issue like COVID-19. At Simplicity, our leadership prepared long before the March 12th move to work remotely to ensure our team’s safety. We secured the tools that the team needed to successfully transition to home environments, so they were prepared to assist our clients without any interruption.
The efforts of our leadership, in preparing the Simplicity team were on target. During this COVID crisis, leadership continues to provide the team with any new requirements to support them. The team’s needs are paramount in helping our clients use Simplicity’s cloud-based platform; especially as our customers shift to remote work and need to maintain business continuity.
Simplicity’s leadership has been both steady and preemptive with employee communications, maintaining regular all hands staff calls, and by adding 1:1 calls as extra touch points. There have been layers of support to encourage employee relationships by holding virtual social hours, sending regular email updates, and inspirational messages. There have also been some goodies and paycheck bonuses along the way to help everyone stay upbeat and to support local initiatives like Virginia Restaurant Week.
Taking employee communication further, the leadership team has been transparent with their proactive steps taken to ensure the fiscal well-being of the company and our employees’ livelihood.
In addition to paid employees, Simplicity has a number of selling partners who are trusted advisors to our clients and are essential members of our team. We have been in constant contact with our partners offering ways to connect (as a group and individually), sharing special client promotions, partaking in education, and to help them benefit from fiscal stimulus offerings that are specific to their business models. In turn, these trusted advisors have partnered with us by reaching out to customers to offer support and to assist with needed solutions.
At Simplicity VoIP, our communications with clients has been proactive and varied using multiple mediums to connect including emails, blogs, webinars, social channels, our website, and with phone calls. We launched the Simplicity VoIP Knowledge Base, as an anytime-anywhere, online support tool. Simplicity offered a web session about working remotely and business continuity that was followed by emails with user guides and videos highlighting our platform’s features.
The creation and launch of a Remote Working Resource webpage with platform details as well as COVID health organization and business relief source links to resources for the wider community was accomplished. In addition, we personally called each individual Simplicity customer to answer questions and offer support.
Simplicity VoIP leadership’s focus was that at the center of our communications effort, we would demonstrate our care for, and aid in the well-being of our community. In essence, we are all seeking connections during this time of uncertainty. Hopefully through our efforts, the message “we are here for you” is coming through loud and clear.
About Simplicity
Simplicity VoIP, based in Richmond, VA, provides hosted PBX, VoIP and business telephone solutions nationally to small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses for a comprehensive unified communications experience. It’s Class 5 geo-redundant VoIP platform is offered in addition to fax-to-email, phones and equipment, and managed services. Named as Richmond’s 11th fastest growing company by Richmond BizSense in 2018, Simplicity VoIP’s key to success is its on-site service, installation and training supported 24/7/365 by a world-class client services team.
