The Basics of Reducing Your Business’s Carbon Footprint
Your business’s carbon footprint doesn’t stop with just your own emissions. The economy is a web; your business depends on customers in one direction and suppliers in the other. Your impact on the environment extends to the impact of your suppliers, your partners, and your customers.
So what does reducing your business’s carbon footprint look like?
- Monitor your supply chain – Several countries, most recently Germany, have proposed environmental regulations that force businesses to take responsibility for emissions within their supply chain. The United Kingdom, for instance, enforces similar regulations for suppliers to public sector organizations.
- Build a sustainable partner ecosystem – To stay on top of carbon emissions you need a partner ecosystem you can trust; that works with you to build sustainable business practices.
- Invest in carbon cutting tech – Leaving behind the old and embracing the new is the first step toward building sustainable business practices.
Reducing your business’s carbon footprint is a multi-year project that requires sizeable investment. But there are obvious places to start. The first of these is the cloud.
Reducing Your Business’s Carbon Footprint with Cloud Technology
The cloud represents a computing revolution. In the past, organizations were dependent on on-premise servers. These produced an enormous amount of heat and had to be cooled, maintained, and replaced at that organization’s expense.
Every organization that leveraged major IT systems (be that data storage, online services, or mass communications) needed its own infrastructure. This produced massive carbon inefficiencies, as organizations had no way to both support this technology, and invest in off-setting carbon output.
That was before the cloud. Today, the cloud:
- Brings digital infrastructure for a host of different organizations into a single location, where they can be managed by a dedicated team of experts.
- The data center takes on the cost of cooling and maintaining all those servers, taking advantage of economies of scale to reduce your business’s carbon footprint.
- Data centers often engage in carbon offsetting programs – investing in renewable energy or other carbon reduction projects to counterbalance their carbon output.
Cloud services centralize digital infrastructure for multiple organizations into a single place, allowing you to more easily measure and manage carbon output within your digital supply chain.
But carbon reduction covers more than your suppliers. You need to be thinking about your customers, too.
Cloud CX Reduces Your Business’s Carbon Footprint
Your number one priority should be the well-being of your customers. Your customers want convenience, but they don’t want it to cost the Earth. Your organization needs ways to deliver outstanding, effortless customer experience as efficiently as possible.
A cloud CX solution makes this possible. By reducing customer effort, allowing for flexible working, and enabling self-service, you reduce the carbon cost of customer contact.
- Cloud CX enables flexible working for your customer service agents. This means less carbon outputted during the commute, multiplied by every agent in your contact center. Less money spent on heating and lighting offices, and an improved agent experience that translates to customer well-being.
- Callouts are expensive, for your business and the environment. In industries where callouts are required, such as utilities or healthcare, enabling self-service options for customers reduces the likelihood that a callout will be required. A cloud CX solution provides the AI-backed tools you need to make self-service easy.
- The more efficient your customer contact, the more value-for-carbon. By reducing wait times, automating simple and repetitive inquiries, and scaling flexibly to meet any level of demand, you can ensure that what carbon you do emit is used productively.
