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WHITE PAPER

The 2023 CEO/CFO Counter-Inflation Playbook

Learn the top five IT/Telecom strategies for saving time, cutting costs and boosting productivity

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  4. The 2023 CEO/CFO Counter-Inflation Playbook

Though IT, telecom and internet services are not often the first place the C-Suite instinctively looks for cutting costs and driving productivity gains, earnest self-assessments and smart consolidations can recover unexpected yet significant rewards in these areas. Five counter-inflation strategies, in particular, prove low-hanging fruit for any C-Level playbook.

Read our white paper, The 2023 CEO/CFO Counter-Inflation Playbook, to discover how you can beat inflation by eliminating redundancies, consolidating tools and deploying Unified Communications, AI and automation to accelerate tasks and results.

The 2023 CEO/CFO Counter-Inflation Playbook

Invest in an independent, third-party IT/Telecom Audit

Rethinking IT, telecom and internet services can open promising opportunities for cutting costs, increasing sales, improving service and enhancing customer experiences.

It’s best to contract an outside firm to help you look within. With no sense of self-conflict to impede them, they can objectively guide your team to review your current IT, telecom and internet service contracts, equipment and expenses under unflinching scrutiny. They can also task auditors to remove avoidable redundancies and overlapping costs.

There are some steps you can take right away to cut excess spending. These include:

    1. Eliminate unnecessary and/or barely used services within business units and across departments.
    2. Find ways to bundle services for efficiency and discounts.
    3. Renegotiate to optimize your wireless plan.
    1. Align your IT, telecom and internet services with your strategic business goals, rather than day-to-day functional processes.
    2. If you haven’t done so already, go all-in on Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and deploy omnichannel technologies, especially in your contact centers.
    3. Be more open to  a hybrid workforce. Allow more employees to telecommute than your comfort zone might normally tolerate.

Respect your communications channels as transformational, rather than regarding them as merely transactional. This means giving your customer-facing communications platforms the C-Suite attention they deserve by being aware and engaged.

Do more than just collect and review data reports on customer experience. Consciously and purposely use them to identify weaknesses, ensure improvement and accountability and inform and evolve corporate culture.

Be sure customer-facing employees are inspired and empowered. Train them well, equip them fully—then trust them to perform. Give them the tools, resources and sufficient authority to delight customers across interactions.

Implement AI communication and engagement tools to learn from interactions and improve customer experiences. AI software such as speech recognition can help your teams determine, in real time, if customers are delighted or dissatisfied and adjust interactions and protocols accordingly.

Deploy Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) to improve network efficiency. These smart, “self-aware” networks are programmed to analyze themselves, learn from the results and optimize through put performance. They automatically prioritize and allocate bandwidth to mission critical applications during peak times of the day.

Automate contact center productivity by moving operations to the cloud. Time consuming repetitive tasks can be a black hole for FTE hours. Look to leverage cloud-based automation tools to centralize, confirm and repeat what consistently works for the operation, while rooting out and revealing what consistently fails.

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Astound Business meets you where you are and how you want to communicate. We're focused on taking out friction points and delivering solutions that scale.

Listening & Discovery

Understanding the key issues that need to be solved is first, we won’t sell you a fixed set of products. We listen and provide a diversity of connectivity solutions aligned to your specific business. Up front, our experts learn how your business works, to uncover how things could be done differently to find efficiencies and new profit centers. Getting the pulse of our clients, then right-fitting solutions and delivering on time is how we operate.

Solution Planning & Design

Meeting your needs where you are, technical experts provide unique solutions by creating a project plan that covers scope, timing, cost and execution. A dedicated account team aligns to design a custom network that delivers secure connectivity. From kick-off to site survey to construction and integration — your account manager and solutions engineering team provides comprehensive project management.

Implementation

You’ll receive end-to-end build management from a dedicated account manager and an implementation driven by local experts. We are never bureaucratic. We respect your time, while handling all the details. We offer flexibility in infrastructure and expansion, where others can’t, through dark fiber delivery.

Monitoring & Maintenance

Focused on your connectivity, we care about our own network and are not overextended. Experienced staff are monitoring the infrastructure around the clock to deliver stability, while adhering to SLA metrics. We pick up the phone immediately. Astound’s organizational structure is set up for superior response & support.

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