Sweat the Small Stuff

When it comes to life, business, and planning, you've probably heard people say, "Don't sweat the small stuff." Focusing on the large issues is often a useful strategy. In communications, however, sweating the small stuff really does come in handy as well.

This is especially true regarding the planning process and deployment of your communications system. Paying attention to those little details, could very well be the critical factor that helps your company reach its goal.

Invest in Good Equipment
What kind of headsets are you buying for your employees? That's an example of the small stuff that's actually an investment in everyone's success.

If you truly care about giving users a good experience, you won't cut corners with cheap headphones. Every party on a call is relying on his or her headset to listen to what's being said. A $29 headset might stretch your budget across many new users, but the experience will suffer. For that price, you're not going to get a headset certified to work in that kind of situation.

Buying laptops for employees is expensive, but spending an extra $100 might mean getting a slightly better model that's capable of driving higher-quality calls. If you're using softphones and PC clients, you should make sure that the laptop's processor is capable enough for the task at hand.

Invest in Training
All too often I see companies that don't invest enough effort in user training. They don't stand up simple training portals to help teach users how to perform unfamiliar tasks. Vendors provide the material, but quite often they never flip the switch to turn the portal on -- or, if they do, they spend little time ensuring staff have utilized the training.

Likewise, companies don't take the time to actively train their staffs on functionality that requires more learning than could be served up in a simple training. They see training as an unnecessary expense. "We don't need to worry about that. The user will just get used to it eventually" is, quite simply, the wrong attitude to have.

User Experience Is King
It's a competitive environment out there these days -- organizations care about investing in doing better for their employees and business operations as a whole. I can't stress the importance of these small details enough. If users aren't satisfied with their experiences, they will start using something else.

It's funny to see companies willingly spend hundreds of dollars per employee in one area yet cut corners to save a few dollars somewhere else. They purchase new smartphones for $600 apiece along with expensive data plans. Then they'll only allow employees to use the free connection in the lobby. Those kinds of shortsighted decisions drive down the overall quality and productivity that drove the purchase decision in the first place.

Don't make the same mistake. Do sweat the small stuff so you don't undo the goal you've been working so hard to meet.