Running a business in this day and age couldn’t have been easier, all thanks to the myriad of technology available at our disposal. Irrespective of the type of business you run or the industry you operate in, tools and software exist for all business operations and departments. While certain tools help improve productivity, others make communication easier and promote teamwork.
Whichever business function you feel needs optimization, there exists an app for it.
If there is an easier way to do things, why bother with confusing processes and manual work. As a manager, it should be your aim to make your employees’ work as easy as possible. Depending on your individual business needs, given below are four apps and tools that can help improve efficiency in small businesses:
Virtual Calling Systems
Your team most possibly spends hours at a time calling customers to address complaints, transferring calls, and manually dialing numbers. The absence of a calling system also leads to your customers often dialing the wrong extension, and your employees would have to manually guide them.
While you may think these tasks simply cost your employees a few extra minutes, these minutes quickly add up to become hours and can take a toll on their efficiency. Your employees would rather spend those crucial work hours dealing with topics of interest and dealing with customer complaints.
Virtual calling or phone systems help automate calling processes by introducing your customers to self-help menus and redirecting their calls to the concerned personnel. Your employees can use these phoning systems to contact clients and customers without manually dialing numbers.
Also Read: 6 Important Tools for Every Remote Team
Your customer service departments can use these systems to handle multiple customer calls at a time effectively and hence improve their work efficiency. 8×8 is a comprehensive, popular virtual phone system and an all-in-one solution to all your business’ calling needs. It is specifically designed to handle high call volumes and work for remote teams.
Project management software and collaboration tools
Companies often have interdepartmental teams that feature multiple team members and several tasks that need to be fulfilled in multiple steps when working on a project. It is likely that for each given task, there exist multiple phases that different members in a sequence handle. To add to the confusion, some members may be located in the head office while others may be working remotely. Hence, irrespective of the scale of the project your company may be involved in, it is important that your team uses a reliable project management software or collaboration tool.
Project management software and collaboration tools such as Trello help support all sorts of projects, whether they be marketing campaigns, data entry tasks, content publishing, and human resource tracking. Trello is an important tool in the entire Atlassian products portfolio and possibly the most popular one.
Businesses can create relevant “boards” for their teams, invite relevant members, create tasks, categorize them and assign them to respective members. Once the relevant member completes their task, they can mark it completed on the board, and the admin or manager may then forward the task or” card” to another relevant member.
Document management software
Companies need to effectively manage all work documents and spreadsheets for the same of running all their systems and processes. Companies have to deal with a lot of digital paperwork in terms of legal contracts, employee agreements, payroll data, employee information, accounts, financial statements, process guidelines, and frameworks. All of this paperwork stems from different departments, and most of it is a commonplace and shared between multiple departments, such as payroll data being shared between human resource and finance teams.
Hence, companies need to use reliable document management software such as Google Workspace that helps them organize all company data and also keep it safe. Google Workspace is Google’s solution to cloud computing and features hit products such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Drive.
It also features Gmail, Contacts, and Google Meet. All of these products offer a comprehensive solution to document management in addition to offering a bunch of other functionalities. The best part about Google Workspace is that it offers all of these products for free and even gives every mail account 15 GB of free space.
Instant communication software and tools
If your company has remote employees, you would understand the need for instant communication between team members. For everyday matters that need to be resolved instantly, your employees cannot be sending emails to their colleagues as that would eat up a lot of their significant time, and the issue at hand might progress out of their control.
Your employees should be able to communicate with their colleagues through a comprehensive solution that enables chat, message, call, video call, and document sharing. While email is impractical, WhatsApp is too informal.
The best solution in this scenario would be to use instant communication tools such as Slack which allows employees to communicate with one another through any mobile device, laptop, or PC. Slack also gets easily integrated with other tools such as Google Drive for document sharing and Mail Chimp for email marketing.
In addition to enabling calls, videos, and messages, Slack also accommodates file upload and sharing in multiple formats. It is a professional yet instant form of communication that can make collaboration between team members easy and is suitable for remote and in-office teams alike.
Final Words on Apps & Tools To Improve Efficiency In Tech Businesses
To remain relevant in today’s competitive work environment, companies need to optimize their work processes and use relevant tools to improve efficiency at work. In addition to increasing efficiency, the above-mentioned tools help make work fun and breezy for employees.
Companies are constantly in the need of cloud computing, document sharing, communication support, and collaborative tools. If all of these processes can be made easier by incorporating easy-to-use tools in employees’ everyday lives, managers should make it their priority to use relevant software.
Tools such as Google Workspace, Trello, Slack, and 8×8 can greatly ease the way your employees work, and free up space in their schedules to focus on things that truly matter.
Read Next:
- Digital Collaboration Tools: The Benefits to your Team
- 10 Online Tools to Make Cool Marketing Content