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Five Tips For Setting Up A Virtual Office Environment

Oct 06, 2021
Virtual Office


The virtual office – where clients, customers, suppliers and partners interact with your business as though it has an office location, but in practice your employees are working remotely - is an increasingly appealing idea. Not only has it been essential through lockdowns, but many businesses will want to continue operating this way into the future, as it can be a significant cost saving on office spaces.


Having a sustainable and effective virtual office environment requires the strategic use of communications and IT. Importantly, it also means minimising the risk of downtime. The more your business operation relies on technology to communicate and collaborate, the greater the cost of downtime. At Reliance Communications, we have a long history in assisting companies with making that shift, and here are a couple of key learnings that we’ve taken away from those projects.


1) Make sure the phone system is of a high quality


The quality of the phone system is critical to the success of a virtual office; you need to make sure that customers, clients, suppliers and co-workers are able to get in touch with the right person when they need it, while still creating the perception that everyone’s working in the same office.


To this end, you should look into a hosted PBX solution that has automated call routing and forwarding, as well as cloud-based management and analytics so that the performance of the phone system can be monitored.


Another feature that defines a high-quality hosted PBX solution is if it can be integrated with Microsoft Teams and your CRM. Bringing all of your organisation’s data together is a powerful tool that will help you optimise your processes and better engage with your customers.


Speak to Reliance Communications for setting up managed phone systems to meet your business’ growth objectives.


2) Move as much as possible to the cloud


Just as you moved your productivity solutions to Microsoft 365/Teams or GSuite, to allow your people to work on documents in the cloud, you can move many more of your business processes, too. For your virtual office to be as efficient as possible, you need to minimise the number of manual processes within your workplace. This means adopting cloud solutions for billing and invoicing, using cloud-based storage solutions for sharing documents, and adopting productivity tools that can assist with workflow management. Many of these tools, from Dropbox and Google Drive through to Slack, have free options. Others will generally incur a monthly cost, though at the benefit of not having up-front pricing for licenses and new editions.


3) Get your collaboration in order


With the right phone system, you can allow your staff and customer to communicate freely. With video conferencing you can hold remote meetings. But this isn’t quite the same as having a fully collaborative virtual environment. You want to be looking at tools like Microsoft Teams, not only for the video conferencing ability, but for the way that teams can enable document sharing, minutes record keeping, scheduling, and other collaborative exercises.


Reliance Communications can assist you with making the most of your Microsoft Teams experience. Talk to us today.


4) Build the new way of working into your culture


With virtual organisations there is always the risk that employees will start to feel isolated, or potentially burn themselves out by working well beyond the hours a structured office environment generally allows.

As such it’s important to consider the company culture when setting up a virtual office. Make sure you set specific office hours (so employees don’t need to answer calls from customers deep into the night), and make sure there are opportunities for the social interactions that happen around the water cooler too.


5) Make sure your security is up to date


It goes without saying that the virtual office involves a lot of work online, and that means that security should be paramount. Be sure to use VPNs and other high-grade security tools to protect your communications, and make sure you keep the anti-viruses and firewalls up-to-date on all computers. Contact Reliance Communications for any questions that you may have regarding security – there’s no reason that your communications can’t be secure, but you do need to adopt some best practice.


Remember: Reliance Communications has a long history in helping with virtual offices and the communications that underpin them. Contact us today to set your business up for a dynamic, virtual future.

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Big News Reliance Is 8x8 ANZ Partner Of The Year 2022/2023!  We’re proud of this prestigious award and we’re just getting started Reliance Communications and 8x8 share an uncompromising vision for delivering incredible customer experiences, and we’re thrilled to be such a key 8x8 partner. We’ve been working with 8x8 since 2017, and in that six years we have gained valuable experience with the 8x8 technology stack that provides the expertise to assist our customers to transform and improve their communications and business management. Through hard work and dedication, Reliance has grown to be 8x8’s leading voice in the market, awarded the honour of 8x8 ANZ Partner Of The Year 2022/2023. This award is founded on our commitment to our customers and 8x8. Reliance is dedicated to ensuring every customer has an incredible 8x8 experience. Not only have we just been honoured with the award win, Reliance has been globally certified with complete 8x8 XCaaS accreditation, elevating us into an elite club of expertise. There is only a handful of 8x8 partners in the world with this level of accreditation, and we are extremely proud to know we are in the best position to assist our customers. What is XCaaS? XCaaS stands for “Experience Communications-as-a-Service”, and it’s the epitome of the 8x8 philosophy. Essentially, it brings customer and employee experience together with contact centre, voice, video, chat, and APIs on one cloud-native platform. 8x8 is a pioneer in this area, with XCaaS being the first and only platform of its kind in the market. The way it optimises an omnichannel customer experience with data-driven insights, while enabling employee engagement in a work-from-anywhere world. It’s also totally secure and delivers 99.999 per cent uptime. We know from our conversations with clients that these are two major concerns. Cyber security is a bigger headache than ever, and every minute the communications system is down, is money lost. XCaaS solves these problems and is wrapped up in a solution that is ideal for everything from small businesses all the way to large enterprises. Learn more about 8x8 XCaaS here. Reliance is your partner for XCaaS As your fully certified XCaaS partner, Reliance Communications can help you get up and running quickly. We’re here to take the pain out of installing and managing the system, so you can benefit from the innovative features without worry. XCaaS solves what businesses need today and offers a clear and easy pathway to what comes next. Reliance helps you capitalise on the opportunity without undertaking an expensive transformation project, and without investing in internal resources. We’re a true partner to your company and we’ll make sure we get it done for you. We’d like to thank 8x8 for their support. As a managed services provider, the market can be incredibly difficult if vendors don’t support their channel. We appreciate how easy it is for 8x8 to invest into them, as they reciprocate by investing into companies like ours. We’re certainly determined to do everything we can to keep winning this award every year! In the meantime, contact us and we will get you running on XCaaS. It’s all benefits, no fuss.
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