Competitive Advantage. The words still resonate even though I was hearing them for the umpteenth time. I was taking in a ballgame with some associates and customers when someone said “competitive advantage” in the middle of an opinion they were sharing on a sports related issue. My thoughts wandered away from the conversation as I started to ponder the basic concept of what competitive advantage means and how important it is going to be as economic conditions continue to segregate companies that thrive from those that just survive and the inevitable casualties this downturn will produce. Numerous companies that have failed recently or are soon to go bankrupt, focused so much on what they were doing, they lost sight of how they stacked up against their competitors. In doing so, they allowed the competition to capture too much market share making their own survival impossible. I think everyone agrees that more fatalities are soon to follow.

It seems so obvious and fundamental, that I consider extraordinary failures like Circuit City completely predictable. At a time when technology is getting more complicated, they laid-off their most knowledgeable people. To save money, they retained or hired people that they knew had less knowledge than the employees of their main rivals. In doing so they gave up the only advantage that they had demonstrated while competing within this vertical market. What followed was all but inescapable. The obvious question that arises is “what can I do to generate a competitive Advantage?”

In his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter defines three distinct methods to create competitive Advantage.
Cost Leadership – Can you provide an equal offering as your competitor at a lower cost?
Differentiation – Can you provide more service, a better experience, for the same cost as your competitor can you provide a unique deliverable?
Focus – Can you concentrate on a process of delivery targeted to a narrow competitive segment that sustains a leadership position for the market share in question?

Byte Logic Solutions is in the Competitive Advantage business. For those of you thinking we are in the communications business, that’s just how we go to market. If you look closely at our offering, we help the companies that we work with lower their communications costs. In some cases the difference is dramatic. Lower costs can be a bridge to lower customer pricing which characterizes Cost Leadership. Byte Logic Solutions’ hosted telephony customers enjoy the enterprise class performance delivered by the same state-of-the-art equipment specified in over 90 percent of Fortune 50 corporations. This feature rich, tested stable, and proven secure communications package allows you to provide a level of customer service that is second to none. If your competition is not keeping current, you have generated Differentiation by maximizing the respect and attention paid to your customers.

The Byte Logic Solutions offering provides the most reliable and feature rich telephony methodology available today. We can help quickly identify customer needs and seamlessly escalate them to the best solution inside your operation. We can minimize transaction and wait times for customers as well as employees. There are more than 900 additional features available to insure efficiency, improve customer service, and simplify the process for your employees by utilizing our systems built-in sophistication and automation. All of this translates into less stress on employees and a better customer experience for people calling into your operation looking to do business with you. When you make that customer experience your Focus, can you imagine a better competitive advantage? Byte Logic Solutions can’t do what you do but we can surely help you modernize and streamline the way your people communicate with each other and with your customers without worrying about how. With that taken care of you and your people can do what you do better.