As your company grows, your team won’t have enough time to manage each business process, task, and project manually. To increase employees’ performance, boost customers’ satisfaction, and reduce costs, you should invest in the right tools. Here is how the right software solutions can help your SMB grow.
Simplifying Project Management
For project managers, it can be difficult to manually track employee performance and hand out the right tasks to the right people. Fortunately, you can invest in cloud-based project management tools like Basecamp, Trello, or Asana.
Instead of briefing each employee on their new tasks and responsibilities, project managers can create new projects, lists, and tasks within a single platform. They can add the right people to projects, assign tasks, post thorough instructions, and set deadlines.
Project management tools simplify employees’ lives, too. They can finally share project documents in a single platform and make them visible to everyone on the project. Above all, their deadlines and roles will be strictly defined, helping them prioritize their tasks and manage time effectively.
Easier Communication and Collaboration
To increase workplace performance, SMBs need to enable an uninterrupted flow of information among their teams. This is particularly important to companies that are hiring remote workers. Video chat tools play a fundamental role in improving employee communication and nurturing stronger relationships among them.
For example, with Slack’s paid plan, employees can share their screens while working, chat with their teammates, or even start a video call with their team. GoToMeeting even lets businesses host video conferencing calls with 100 people. That is a great way to help your employees connect on a more personal level, irrespective of their location. Above all, by communicating with your remote workers regularly, you will boost their morale and help them feel accepted and involved.
Automating Business Processes
To stay competitive and grow faster, small businesses need to map their business operations and identify ones that should be automated. Now, there are many aspects of your business you should automate.
The first one is your finances. Hiring an in-house accountant or an accounting agency can be expensive for small businesses and startups. That is where investing in an accounting tool can help. With QuickBooks, FreshBooks, or Xero, you can track your cash flow in real-time, send invoices, and pay your business’ bills faster.
The second one is the digital product development. In software development phases, many tech companies find it difficult to synchronize development and technology operations teams. The lack of collaboration often results in many errors, unnecessarily complex development processes, and delays. To ensure continuous deployment and monitoring, improve workflow, and automate tasks, many companies are adopting the DevOps as a service mindset. This may help you focus more on new tasks, cut down unnecessary costs, and boost customer satisfaction instead of fixing unplanned errors.
Companies in manufacturing industries can also automate most of their operations by investing in manufacturing software. With these cloud-based platforms, they can centralize important business processes, from procurement and inventory management to sales and marketing, under a single tool. Above all, they can integrate their manufacturing software with other important tools they use, such as eCommerce software, accounting tools, payment gateways, etc.
Automation is highly important in the HR sector, as well, as it helps HR professionals streamline many repetitive tasks that require lots of paperwork and time. For example, they can now automate payroll processes, candidate screening, leave requests, training requests, offboarding, new employee onboarding, etc.
Creating a Consistent Brand Online
For any growing business, investing in digital marketing is critical. Still, managing your business presence across multiple channels manually is extremely challenging. That is where you should automate your digital marketing processes.
With hashtag tracking tools and social media listening tools, you can monitor your brand mentions across the web and track brand sentiment. Social media management tools let you automate your social media posting activities. You can also set up many automated email marketing workflows, such as sending welcome emails, lead nurturing workflows, re-engagement workflows, event workflows, and so forth.
Improving Customer Experiences
Customers are the backbone of your business. Their experiences with your brand directly impact how fast your company will grow. Remember that today’s customers have become highly demanding. They expect brands to provide instant feedback, address their needs, and offer relevant deals and content.
That is why you should invest in a CRM tool. These tools help you keep a customer’s contact details updated, monitor customers’ interactions with your brand, and manage customers’ accounts. They help you stay on top of each interaction with a customer. This way, you will learn something new about your customers and use this data to improve customer relationships, personalize your offers and content, and boost customer lifetime value.
There are many tools that help you centralize customer relationships. For example, with LiveAgent, you can integrate your email ticketing, voice calls, video calls, social media channels, and live chat services within a single platform. Many businesses decide to invest in HubSpot because it provides a wide range of free features, such as ticketing, live chat, team mail, conversations inbox, and chatbots.
Conclusions
Staying competitive and growing your business can be a major challenge in a hypercompetitive SMB environment. However, with the help of the right tools, you can streamline many business operations, boost workplace performance, enhance customer experiences, and reduce your costs. I hope these tips will help you!
Featured image credit: Rawpixel.com
My name is Raul, editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can reach me out on Twitter.
