Historically speaking, one of the biggest challenges that professionals in the franchise industry face on a daily basis is one of logistics. Managing one location with dozens of employees, many of whom are likely spread out across great distances as they work both in a physical location and even potentially in the field, is difficult on the best of days – to say nothing of how hard everything becomes if you add two, three or even four additional locations.
In many ways, communication as a service (also commonly referred to as CaaS) was designed to relieve these challenges and allow the franchise industry to act together as the united front it was meant to be. CaaS uses technology to unit the franchise industry in a number of different ways that are definitely worth exploring.
What is Communication as a Service?
At its core, Communication as a Service is a collection of different telecommunications services provided by venders that are all designed to make business-related communications easier than ever before. It’s an alternative to the traditional business model of the communications sector that requires a business to buy and install licensed software or hardware for every instance that it will be used across an enterprise.
Say you were a franchise industry professional that was operating three separate locations spread out over a great distance. You wanted to unit your employees through video conferencing and were looking for ways to accomplish exactly that. Under a traditional model, you would need to not only purchase all of the hardware and software needed for this deployment, but you would also need to install it yourself. This requires a huge amount of time and effort on your part, also putting the burden of responsibility on you if something goes wrong.
Additionally, depending on the areas where those locations are operating in, the same service provider might not be available at all three locations. Now, you’re suddenly dealing with all of your own hardware and software and two different service providers, creating a massive logistical nightmare if something goes wrong – to say nothing of the productivity you’ll lose due to how difficult it is to fix issues with this type of setup.
With communications as a service, however, all of these challenges go away. A single vendor provides you everything you need to get video conferencing off the ground at all locations in one easy, flexible “pay as you go” model. The communications services often provided by CaaS vendors usually include telephone service, instant messaging, collaboration tools, mobile access, cloud-support and more – just to name a few.
The Benefit of Communication as a Service to the Franchise Industry
Based on the previous example, it’s easy to see why communications as a service is quickly becoming so popular in the franchise industry in general. For one, it’s an excellent way to control costs as your organization continues to expand. At any given moment, you’re only actually paying for the services that you’re using. If you suddenly need to add or remove support for an employee who was recently hired or left your company, you can do so instantly without affecting your costs in any significant way.
Communications as a service also removes not only the initial investment of deploying these services yourself, but the money and energy you need to plan for in order to take care of your systems moving forward. If something goes wrong, it isn’t your problem – the CaaS vendor will fix it. That is what they’re there for.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of all, however, is that communications as a service completely breaks down the barrier of geography that used to pose such a significant issue for franchise industry professionals. CaaS functionality is often delivered through the cloud, meaning that any device with an active Internet connection is now a powerful tool for your employees to use to be productive from nearly any location on the planet. If you have an employee out in the field, he or she doesn’t need to return to the office in order to get their job done. They can be just as productive during a remote client meeting as they can be sitting in front of their desk. Additionally, any information from that client meeting is also instantly available to all other employees within your organization.
Communications as a service guarantees all of the reward with none of the risk to the franchise industry, making it clear that it is a trend that should be embraced by businesses moving forward.
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