How can businesses pick the right enterprise collaboration platform?

Recently, we wrote about the leading online collaboration tools that facilitate remote work in 2020 and which are the best alternatives to Microsoft Teams your business can consider. We know how important it must be for you to facilitate remote work collaboration among your teams positioned far and wide, at their homes or co-working spaces. That’s why this time we decided to share a few tips on what all you need to consider while choosing the best enterprise collaboration software for your business. 

Half the year down, COVID-19 is still doing its rounds worldwide, pushing the economy to a slow reopening after months of lockdown. While some countries are experiencing drastic spikes in the number of cases, others are witnessing a gradual decline of cases. Irrespective of their geographical positions, a huge section of the global workforce is poised to continue working remotely for a long time to come in the interest of safety.

Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times

So, here are 5 things you need to keep in mind while choosing an enterprise collaboration platform for your business:

1. Evaluate your needs

All modern-day enterprise collaboration platforms have tons of features and each of these features may sound exciting when you hear or explore them initially. However, not all businesses need all these features to be present in their collaboration software. You need to go back to the drawing board, run a campaign internally within your workforce to identify the challenges they face in collaboration, the tools, and support they need through a collaboration platform, and then have a look at features offered by leading vendors. This will help to keep your digital infrastructure optimized and personalized according to the needs of your workforce. 

Rather than the management implementing a platform that is most appealing to them, the focus here is to garner requirements from the actual workforce who would be using this platform for collaboration and then pick a vendor that offers these features on demand.

2. Scalability

It is likely that every collaboration software you came across in your search will be a cloud-based one. Thus, you assume that they will be scalable. But scalability is not restricted to just storage on the cloud. By scalability, we mean the ability of the platform to grow across all dimensions as more departments and processes in your business go into the platform. It includes support for feature additions, easy development of new features, accommodating multiple processes and new policies over time, and above all, handles more complex computing needs in the future based on your business’s growth. 

A digital collaboration platform is not something that you invest and implement for the short term. It will be a crucial digital platform that will grow with your business and adapt to changing work trends in the future.

Read More: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19

3. Cost Efficiency

As described in one of the previous points, your business may not need all features as advertised by vendors. By subscribing to more features, you will end up paying more on the subscription fee if the platform offers a “pay for what you use” model of subscription. Some features may be needed only in the future when your business grows and more employees use these features. Hence a platform that allows you to configure your subscription is the most desired option from a cost perspective. Once you identify the features you really need as described earlier, you can pick a vendor that offers you the freedom to pay for only those features on demand.

4. Security

When almost all of your employees work remotely, it is likely that confidential and sensitive customer information will be handled through the enterprise collaboration platform you deploy. Hence there needs to be an adequate security protocol in place within the software that lets you make governing policies on data and information exchange within the digital environment. Permissioned access, transparent work and project management, logged activities, etc. will be required to ensure that there is no compromise in security.

Read more: Why Is Infince A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

5. Usability

When employees are suddenly moved into a new paradigm of working, there will be disruptive impacts on their daily routine. On top of that, if they are allotted a new collaboration platform without adequate onboarding time and awareness, the chaos will multiply many folds. To make a smoother transition into a new enterprise collaboration software, companies must pick a digital platform that has a high focus on usability and provides a comprehensive support and training exercise to help make the transition seamless. 

These tips could be video demonstrations, how to use manuals, a comprehensive FAQ section, dedicated support associates available all time, and much more. Platforms with intuitive interfaces and a shorter learning curve can be given preference for quicker adoption in your workforce.

The remote work culture is here to stay for a long time. We did not mean to say that there will not be a return to the office, but even when work resumes from office, employees would certainly feel much more comfortable to avail of Work from Home options occasionally. The pandemic showed us that it is possible to maintain your productivity levels while working from home to be on par with an office-based culture. 

Read more: How Infince Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Hence the only requirement is that you make the right collaboration platform available to employees. With secure information policies, seamless cloud-based deployment and management, Infince offers the best enterprise collaboration platform for today’s businesses. Get in touch with us to explore more. 

4 ways to bolster your IT team’s efficiency to support remote operations during COVID-19

It’s only the second week of June 2020 and the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has come close to 7.15 million. Governments, businesses, and people have started to realize that we may need to learn to live with the coronavirus for an unexpected period of time, at least until vaccines are found that can neutralize or eliminate its threat for good. Businesses and universities have transitioned their core operations to adopt a remote work culture. Except for some critical work operations that require a physical presence in the workplace, almost all companies now operate with employees working out of their homes.

Read More: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

What does this mean for the IT department across businesses who have moved into a remote work operation mode? 

IT teams need to quickly support the transition of the entire IT work infrastructure into a near 100% remote mode. From productivity tools to instant peer communication platforms, everything needs to be available for employees irrespective of where they are located. 

Here are some best practices you can utilize to get your IT team prepared for keeping your employees connected to their workplace virtually during such uncertain times.

1. Set Communication Policies

While remote working employees need access to multiple communication channels to effectively work on their tasks, it is important for companies to define the clear scope of each channel. One example would be an optimal usage of paid communication channels like VOIP facilities with limited licenses or shared licenses between departments. 

There should be a minimum availability of each such resource and policies must be laid out to ensure optimal utilization. 

Read More: How can businesses manage their remote workforce through efficient communication?

For example, if teleconferencing between team members of a project requires more time and more users to be connected to a single conference call, it can be moved to an online meeting platform that offers unlimited conferencing options rather than using limited license telephone-based VOIP conferences. This offers your IT team the flexibility to allot VOIP facilities to more demanding teams like customer-facing employees who may find it difficult to ask customers to get into online meetings rather than just a conversation over the telephone.

2. Secure Information Access

When employees work from their office, confidential information regarding customer projects may be distributed in local networks which could only be accessed from office computers. 

When there is a shift to remote working, this information should go into a more distributed storage facility that can be accessed over the internet. Hence a proper security policy and protocol must be defined for flexible information access over the internet. This allows IT teams to implement monitoring systems, maintain access logs, set privileged access options, and much more. 

Moreover, all employees need to be strictly made aware of these policies through regular communication from leaders, managers, and HR. Security should not be the sole responsibility of your IT team but an extended oversight of the entire workforce.

Read More: Why Is Infince A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom

3. Provisioning of Digital Platforms and Tools

There is a huge demand for collaboration and communication platforms when employees work together on projects. The demand escalates to unprecedented levels when your stakeholders shift to a remote mode. 

From meetings to file sharing to project management, there is a multitude of managerial overhead for facilitating seamless operations while employees are working from home. 

This calls for the implementation of a powerful digital enterprise platform like Infince which can offer different departments within your organization the necessary digital tools and platforms for communication and collaboration. Such platforms make it easy for your IT team to manage overall digital infrastructure availability for remote workers and make support readily available for their needs at any time.

Read More: Best Practices to Remotely Manage Your Business During COVID-19

4. Measure, Analyze and Improve

For many businesses, this is probably the first instance where such a massive remote working policy came into force and that too in a very short notice. Glitches and delays are expected, but the key focus here should be to learn from each event and ensure a better experience the next time. 

It is important to regularly measure productivity levels of staff and align it with IT objectives such as availability, file management, security and data policies, software and license management, etc. 

Set out clear KPIs for measuring employee productivity during the timeline of remote work. The measured values should be analyzed to arrive at trends that occur in work patterns frequently. Feedback from employees should be collected with regards to infrastructural availability, network, or communication channel flexibility, etc. Learnings from all these should be factored in while your IT department optimizes your digital infrastructure to meet rising demands from your workforce.

Read More: How Infince helps you quickly transit to remote working

The remote work culture is expected to remain a norm for months to come as the COVID-19 pandemic is not showing a dramatic rate of containment of spread. Your IT teams need the most resilient enterprise IT platforms to help manage complex requirements of the entire workforce who are working remotely. This is where enterprise platforms like Infince can be their best friend. Get in touch with us to know how some of the world’s best businesses manage their digital workforce infrastructure seamlessly with Infince. 

4 Reasons to Use Infince for Remote Workforce Collaboration

COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more than half of the world population into staying confined within their homes. As social distancing is the only solution available today to prevent the pandemic spread, travel and physical social interactions are at near-zero levels worldwide. For the business world, however, this posed yet another humongous challenge. They had to enable their workforce to shift to a culture of remote working on a massive scale. While several companies have offered flexible work from home options for their staff in the past, this is the first time that such a mandatory remote work culture had to be enforced for almost every single staff.

While the cultural shift was immense, one of the best ways for businesses to keep their staff connected virtually and enable seamless collaboration among them was to use digital enterprise collaboration tools. Video calling became the de-facto mode of employee interactions. But a few weeks into the new culture, there have been serious issues that plagued the digital infrastructure that several businesses relied on.

The widely popular Zoom video conferencing app was used by businesses, educational institutes, government authorities and a whole plethora of other organizations to help their employees and communities stay connected and continue service delivery through remote video conferencing. However, security experts soon revealed that Zoom’s privacy and data integrity claims for its services were not trustworthy. It was found that the app dangerously leaked private confidential and business data of millions of people to other parties such as Facebook as well as being exploited by cybercriminals. Within days, several governments, schools, and thousands of private companies banned the usage of Zoom for their video conferencing needs due to the privacy concerns and dubious data handling policies of Zoom.

So, the challenge for businesses now is to find a replacement for Zoom to manage their remote work collaboration needs. Well, they don’t have to look further than Infince, the most trusted digital enterprise platform for small and medium businesses. It facilitates remote work management and safe video conferencing to help businesses continue their operations with remote staff without compromising on security, efficiency, and productivity.

Related Reading: Infince Can Help You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Four reasons why you should try Infince for a safe video conferencing and efficient collaboration experience:

1. Secure Video Conferencing

Infince offers an integrated enterprise digital video conferencing solution that delivers video calling facilities to employees only on access-controlled shared links. It is exclusively aimed at business organizations and hence prevents leakage of any data or information about callers as in the case of Zoom. Only employees with authorized enterprise credentials can join a virtual video meeting using a meeting URL shared by the host of the meeting or via a secure “peer to peer calling link” between two employees. All video conferencing accesses and permissions are securely logged to prevent misuse or unauthorized access.

2. Interactive Collaboration

When enterprises use multiple apps to maintain a remote work culture like Zoom for video conferencing, G-Suite for communication and productivity tools, Dropbox, or other cloud storage apps for storing files, it creates a huge overhead for employees to manage their work and meetings by switching between these. 

Infince offers a unified cloud-based platform that brings together the best of digital conferencing tools like Email, Chats, and secured virtual video meeting rooms for uninterrupted communications. It also combines enterprise management tools like document editors, project management, CRM, etc. for collaboration. All information and data exchange processes and interfaces are secured with information security policies and encryption algorithms for privacy compliance. It enables real-time collaboration between employees seamlessly and in one place.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

3. Safety Firewalls

Infince is an enterprise-grade cloud-based platform that has been designed ground up with strict adherence to global standards in security and data encryption. With advanced firewalls, intelligent threat analysis, and multi-level access control permissions, Infince ensures that your business data remains confidential during internal transactions and collaboration environments.

4. Smarter Sharing

One of the biggest demands in virtual meeting platforms is the sharing of information, files, and even remote screens for issue fixes and configurations by your IT team. Using less secure tools like Zoom can result in such access controls being exploited by cybercriminals since communication occurs via the internet. With Infince, every virtual meeting is encrypted end-to-end and occurs via a secure enterprise calling URL. This prevents external parties from gaining unauthorized access into remote meetings, which was one of the key security threats pointed out with Zoom. Employees can securely share files or even hand over control of their remote screen to concerned departments for configurations and issue management.

As the COVID-19 inflicted lockdown is likely to continue, it is sure that remote working will be a mainstay culture for a long time to come. You need to empower your employees to seamlessly carry out their daily routine from anywhere in the world without having to worry about collaboration problems. This is where Infince can be the game-changer. With uninterrupted video calling, real-time collaboration, and cloud-based subscription, it is the perfect and most cost-effective remote workforce management tool for any business organization. Talk to us to explore the possibilities of Infince in your business today.

Why automation is key to boosting small business productivity?

Most often, we realize the potential of technologies like automation when a critical situation arises. The impact of COVID-19 has forced organizations around the world to transit to a work-from-home productivity model, and many of us are able to execute remote work successfully due to automation. In this post, we’ll explore how automation in small business improves productivity and the different areas where companies can implement automation.

Related Reading: Quickly Transit to Remote Working with Infince

From small tasks such as electronic document signature to intelligent data processing, automation in small business offers limitless possibilities to improve productivity in the small business environment. It is important for decision-makers to invest in the right areas. 

If you are a small business owner looking to turn your workforce more productive through automation this year, then here are 4 areas you need to look at:

1. Automating Sales Workflows

Your sales team often creates the biggest customer impact zone in your business and hence is a worthy contender for incorporating automation in its daily routine. So, what are the sales processes that can be automated within a small business? 

Some examples include assigning associates for leads, setting automated response channels for incoming leads such as emails, IVR based tele-calling or any other contact channels like social media. Once a lead is assigned to an associate for nurturing and conversion, then the next area where automation can kick in is for reminders and follow-ups. Activities involved in deal nurturing and closure can be automated to make the lives of sales folks easier and ultimately improve the productivity of the whole team.

2. Project Management

Today’s workforce demands increasing flexibility in their work and may avail benefits such as remote work. When there are multiple people working on a single customer project or task, and if there are remote resources involved, then project management becomes a challenging endeavor if everything is to be manually handled by managers using spreadsheets, IM and email conversations. This is the right area to bring in automation using state of the art project management platforms. 

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

By enabling automated monitoring of project schedules, individual work progress, and dependency metrics for collaborative tasks, it becomes easier for managers to have a grip on project timelines and ensure that everyone is at the same pace transparently.

3. Procurement and Logistics Processing

There are several routine tasks within procurement departments in a small business that takes up too much time and effort if done manually. A good example would be invoice processing once supplies are obtained. As your business grows, these routine jobs would incur a significantly high volume of effort and can lead to highly inefficient business outcomes due to errors in manual processing. This is where bringing automation in small businesses can be a game-changer. You not only eliminate errors but also improve the speed of processing and completing redundant tasks. 

Approval workflows, scheduling, tracking inventory and vendor notifications are some of the key areas in procurement where automation in small business can vastly change the existing operational landscape.

4. HR and Payroll

Typical human resources work schedule has components that are grossly manual effort intense like payroll processing, profile and resume screening for recruitment, appraisal and performance tracking, rewards and feedback collection, and much more. Automation in any or all these areas will help the HR personnel to be more pro-active in managing employee relations while technology takes care of the manual effort in enabling the same. Ensuring that your employees are engaged is a fundamental goal that needs to be achieved for overall business success and making sure your HR team is empowered to do that via automation is hence a key focus area.

Related Reading: Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Automation in small business is one of the key pillars for propelling companies into the next level for the coming years. As more disruptive business and market conditions continue to show its face every year, it is important for small businesses to remain competitive and allot enough core business skilled employees to handle newer challenges. By utilizing enterprise platforms like Infince, you can enable seamless automation across your key business units and leverage human manpower for more decisive operations. Get in touch with us to know how you can leverage the automation capabilities of Infince to create the next level of success for your business.

4 Key Pillars to Ensure a Seamless BPM Experience for your Business

Small business entrepreneurs often think about how much to invest in digital tools that empower their business operations. The question arises mainly because they are unsure if their organization has attained sufficient scalability to bring on-board a digital enablement platform. Among these, one area where most small businesses cast doubt on digital transformation is business process management. 

There is a notion that BPM and BPM software is meant only for large enterprises with well-defined processes and departmental policies. BPM is a practice even small businesses need to follow and cultivate as a cultural trait right from their startup days. 

Now, the question is when should a small business start adopting BPM in its operations? The need for BPM is driven by the demand for efficiency which ultimately leads to better customer service. On this note, here are 4 key pillars you need to build in your company to ensure a seamless BPM experience:

1. Approval Matrix

In most small businesses, bottlenecks in efficiency occur due to a lack of sync in processes. Employees often wait at managerial desks seeking approvals for implementing changes or customer requirements. Managers, in turn, wait for approvals from senior leadership for various essential affairs. 

Delays in submitting contracts and postponing commitments create a wrong impression on the customer. This can be eliminated by formulating an automated process workflow culture in the organization when metrics on items can determine its approval chances. A simple example could be classifying an approval matrix based on the size of the project. A smaller deal would require just a manger’s approval while bigger ones could require review and approval by higher authorities or leaders. Once this is defined, it will be easier to build a business process around it and ultimately automate it through a BPM software.

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow

2. Building Awareness

As you grow from a startup into an established small business, there will be a rise in the number of employees as well as departments. For collective growth, it is important to ensure that all employees have access to the right information about the company and its offerings. Only then would they be able to handle internal business process improvement practices as well as become effective spokespersons for the company in front of customers. 

Employees should be aware of how every activity in the organization leads to better customer experience. This can be achieved by having a well-defined organizational induction program for new joiners and a continuous learning initiative for on-boarded employees. This learning experience can be used to integrate employee thoughts with business objectives which will ultimately transform employees into torchbearers for BPM practices within their respective roles.

3. Encourage Autonomy

This is a continuation of the learning experience element we mentioned. There are processes within the organization that may have been brought into existence from a very complex background and scaled meaninglessly over time. To break it into simpler business models, it is important to ensure autonomous decision making by employees involved in these complex business operations. 

Related Reading: 5 Ways To Improve Business Growth Through Employee Engagement

Employees should be given time to identify and map activities to processes with guidance gained from experts whenever needed. Hiring BPM specialists to disrupt and re-write such complex processes within one day is not advisable as it may throw employees into a tantrum and lead to highly frustrating experiences.

4. Drive Data Generation

This is one of the most important pillars that need to be established while adopting business process management in a small business. Every department or team in your organization needs to have a standard data generation policy. This generated data should be a base for determining the KPIs for tracking employee performance and growth, defining their intra-departmental or team dependencies, validating their customer satisfaction objectives and much more. Once everything is defined by data, it becomes easier to bring in automation between workflows, thus enabling better process management through BPM software.

Business process management is a transformational initiative that can bring about unparalleled operational efficiency in a small business. But as illustrated here, it needs a strong foundation and support from your entire organization for effective implementation. This is where a well-defined BPM capability built into your organization’s digital backend can be a game-changer. Infince, with its cloud-ready enterprise digital platform, can integrate seamlessly into your operations and enable a sound BPM strategy within your company. Get in touch with us to know more.

The key ingredients that make up an ideal project management dashboard.

Project management is an irreplaceable asset of any business. It plays a crucial role in driving successful business results. Across the globe, companies are increasingly investing in project management tools to help track the progress of their customer deliverables and ensuring efficient operations. 

But are you investing in the right project management capabilities needed to succeed?  

To answer this question you need to be aware of what a project management software needs to offer as features in today’s highly disruptive and digital-first business scenario. 

Here are our picks on the top 5 features you need to make sure are present in your project management dashboard. These will help your workforce to seamlessly deliver successful results for customer projects every time.

Related Reading: 5 Ways A Project Management Tool Can Help Your Business Grow 

1. Smart Workflows

All your efficient planning and strategic direction of managing a project will not find a smooth ride to success unless there are automated workflows that help synchronize different stages of project activity. In simple terms, a workflow can be defined as a series of steps that will be automated to ensure that people and project tasks move seamlessly through defined project milestones. With smarter workflows, team members can be empowered with capabilities such as automatic tracking of project communication, approvals and status updates and much more.

2. Budgeting

The success of every project irrespective of it being a customer-facing or an internal one is primarily dependent on how well it has been budgeted. By budgeting, we mean that there is a transparent view of the project’s budgetary scope and it will be easier for finance or payment teams to view the progress of project schedules and raise invoices according to pre-defined contractual obligations. 

It becomes easier for decision-makers to get a holistic view of how the project is utilizing resources to efficiently manage budgets and scope changes. It also helps them to have knowledge about how much of these budgeted figures have been accepted by the customer or internal teams that required the project. The project management dashboard that you utilize should have a clear space for tracking your budgets and trace anomalies and unexpected escalations in billing.

Related Reading: 5 Must-have Features In A Project Management Tool For Small Businesses

3. KPI Indicators

In the age of performance-oriented work culture, there are quite a lot of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that every project manager needs to keep track of in a project. The KPIs could be related to the project’s budget, milestones and schedules, resource utilization, employee performance, time and effort, customer satisfaction indices and much more. 

The project management platform is the perfect place to have a comprehensive view of these KPI elements and hence your project management software needs to incorporate KPI visibility as a key pillar.

4. Team Management and Collaboration

Customer-facing projects often require a collaborative and constructive approach from multiple team members who may be spread across offices or continents in several cases with different time zones. Bringing them together and offering a seamless collaborative environment is an essential factor and the project management software you choose can play a big part in it. 

By having a dedicated section in the dashboard for team communication as well as collaboration options, platforms like Infince foster a culture of togetherness within the company that will be beneficial for sustained growth in the long run. Examples of collaborative options that employees can directly access from the project management dashboard could be joining meetings virtually through audio or video interfacing, sharing and working collaboratively on documents and files, tracking dependent task progress and much more.

Infince also supports you to quickly transit to remote working. Infince enables your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

5. Reporting

Decisions are often made by leadership by analyzing reports from project managers. These reports cover a wide spectrum of operational and functional parameters of a business. It includes employee performance reports, budget and billing reports, marketing and pipeline or lead generation reports, profit and loss reports, project progress reports and much more. And each of these reports may have multiple variants or sub-reports depending on factors such as geographical classification, vertical or industry-wise classification, product or service wise classification and much more. 

A project management dashboard needs to incorporate a powerful reporting feature that can provide comprehensive yet simplified insights of the entire business or project which will then allow decision-makers to utilize it for their next step or strategic planning.

Managing a project successfully requires considerable effort from managers and team members. But without a digital platform to organize all activities and tasks, there is no way people can handle complex project activities of today manually. This is where enterprise platforms like Infince can be the game-changer. Our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform enables you to successfully manage big or small projects seamlessly with intuitive dashboards offering all the necessary features you need. Our consultants can customize the platform to suit your unique business needs thereby ensuring continuous success for your project management activities. Get in touch with us to know more. 

Why empower your workforce with project management software?

Any organization that wants to serve its customers better should be well-equipped to effectively tackle the project management challenge. Handling multiple client projects and commitments while ensuring optimum utilization of resources involved is often a painful experience for most managers. This is where project management software makes a difference for companies that want to be successful with their daily work management. 

Project management software can help you create milestones and define the core objectives of the project. Studies have shown that 37% of companies today fail with either of these. How can a software-powered project management approach positively influence work management across organizations that handle heavy workloads?

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

Here are a few ways by which project management apps help companies tide over the challenges that plague their work management process:

1. Consolidate Work

Successful delivery of the project to a customer involves a combination of contributions from the service delivery team, billing, finance, sales, account managers, documentation and several others. A comprehensive project management software can bring about a unified platform where all these stakeholders can track the progress of their individual jobs and tasks. It can be a one-stop solution that can help every step of the way from sending quotes to potential customers identified by the sales team to share invoices on the basis of service metrics delivered like billable hours and resource utilization. Bringing all these into a single platform can bring huge relief for managers across departments that are involved in delivering the final service or product to end customers.

2. Track Customer Sentiments

It is a fact that most customer aspirations change over the course of a project and a lot of effort gets wasted in managing changes. With a powerful project management tool in place, it will be easier to accommodate changes in project scope and new requirements without impacting service or work quality. It will be easier to send revised estimates of cost and timelines if everyone utilizes the digital platform to manage their tasks and dependencies. It will be easier to predict the impact that will be experienced due to a new scope change across all departments and stakeholder functions involved in its execution.

3. Foster a Collaborative Culture

When people work in teams to contribute towards a customer project, the most essential capability that they need for attaining success is collaboration. Teams need collaborative spaces where they can discuss work, plan meetings and schedule task deadlines. A project management software offers a virtual workspace that allows teams across departments or offices across geographies to come together and collaborate on a customer-facing task. This allows companies to manage and engage remote workers as well.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

4. Manage Dependencies

A comprehensive project management tool enables teams to work in sync and define dependencies in advance. This allows for proper planning and increased visibility into tasks that have multiple stakeholders who contribute to the end result. The improved transparency will ensure that every member of the team feels responsible for his or her outcome as they can see how their task progress is impacting the work of others. It also enables managers to seamlessly handle project schedules based on resource availability or task progress metrics.

5. Empower Leadership Decision Making

With a project management platform, it is possible to run risk analysis and other measurements on the progress of projects which can help leaders make better decisions. It is possible to calculate costing, resource utilization, timelines and other factors that can inspire decisions related to hiring, client communications, invoicing and even serve as an impetus for sales and marketing teams. Unexpected emergencies and risks can be avoided to an extent if all teams work in sync with the centralized project management tool. This includes the case of even remote workers and managing their working hours which may be in other time zones.

Project management will always be one of the key pillars of success for any business. From meeting customer expectations in delivery timelines to estimating resource requirements, it covers a wide spectrum of managerial activities that take a lot of effort. Bringing this entire aspect into a powerful digital platform will enable better operational efficiency and ultimately lead to a more productive workforce. Platforms like Infince have been helping business to manage their most critical operations successfully with digital power. 

Related Reading: Features to look for while selecting a project management tool for your small business

Project management is one of the key offerings from Infince. With a track record of enabling seamless project management for leading businesses across industries, Infince can be the game-changer in bringing a streamlined project management culture in your business. Talk to us today to know more.

The 5 small business digital trends that cannot be ignored in 2019

The digital transformation wave is gripping all industrial sectors as we speak. But is it really only meant for the big names in the market? Can financial muscle determine the progress a business can make in the digital space? The answer is simply NO! The best thing about the new age digital paradigm is that it opens up possibilities in digital innovation for industries of any size be it small, medium or large enterprises. A lot of thought has come up from revolutionary leaders in the market that focus on empowering small businesses to achieve high levels of success in their business operations. These thoughts have now transformed into the most happening trends in the small business sector and key players are constantly looking at ways to realize value by following and implementing these trends.

Now comes the crucial question. How can small businesses gain knowledge about the right or in fact the best digital trends that suit their operational model? Well, we have it covered in this blog. It’s barely past the first quarter of 2019, and if you are a small business entrepreneur, then we have compiled a list of the top 5 digital trends that your small business needs to onboard in 2019, to achieve success and remain competitive in the highly crowded market.

Let’s begin the exploration:

1. Subscribe to intelligence

Yes, we are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) here but in a more suitable way for small businesses. Today, nearly all top AI-powered technology services are available on a subscription basis for businesses of all sizes to pick and choose based on their needs and preferences. The same AI technology that powers tech giants like Google and Facebook could be used to boost autonomous offerings in your small business as well. This is a big boost for your business sales prospects as well. Studies have shown that the presence of an AI element can boost sales of companies as< 49%< of consumers will be confident in spending money more frequently in business with AI enablement.

All departments of a small business from customer service to human resources, operations and logistics can embrace the power of AI and ML to enable sustainable growth. When insights about customers are made available through tools, small businesses can use them to make business decisions faster and with more accuracy. On the operations side, AI can help small companies hire smarter with faster candidate resume profiling for relevant skill matching through machine learning. The possibilities when AI is enabled are many for small businesses.

1. Personalized marketing

Gone are the days, when fancy advertising and celebrity endorsements formed the crux of marketing for businesses. Today, a small business can creatively outperform a larger brand in the same industry for marketing excellence. By marketing, we do not simply imply great visual representations and ads, but how technology can be a crucial component in bolstering marketing efforts for small businesses. With marketing automation, it has been proven that there is a 12.2 % reduction in marketing overhead and this will positively impact lead generation as well.

In fact, four out of five users of marketing automation witnessed an overwhelmingly positive increase in leads generated. In addition to the numbers, the quality of leads that are generated through targeted and highly personalized marketing tools available today, are significantly higher as well. By diving deep into insights derived from AI enabled marketing tools, small businesses can create high impact campaigns that have more chances of conversion. As for target user segmentation, today’s marketing automation tools help to identify leads that have higher chances of conversion based on past preferences and behavior. It also saves time and money of marketers who would have otherwise spend hours or even days to send thousands of emails to folks who have very minimal chances of doing business with the organization.

Related Reading: Simple Ways to Create a Small Business Website in 2019

1. Workforce Management

A small business often has restrictions on the physical work infrastructure they can offer for employees. But today, the lack of dedicated physical office space is never a constraint on measuring the success of your business. Thanks to advancements in digital tools, it is possible to have a workforce managing your business operations from literally anywhere in the world. You only need to provide a working space for employees that must absolutely be located in an office environment to run your office. Others can simply connect to your business remotely and there are tons of collaborative and management tools available to ensure that a remote workforce operates as efficiently as an in-house team.

Additionally, if your business requires executives to be deployed at filed locations or at customer premises to carry out tasks, then there are tools that assist them to deliver more valuable services. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020,75% of field service organizations with more than 50 users will utilize the capabilities of a mobile app to deliver customer delight. Thus, managing a workforce becomes quite seamless with a host of digital tools available for small businesses to help them empower their workforce to work better and more productively.

1. Digital Payments

You may argue that almost all businesses small or large offer convenient payment modes for customers, it is a known fact that this convenience is limited to cash or card in most cases. The customer of today, however, expects more than just a card swiping option to pay for his or her purchases. This is where small businesses need to invest in building or incorporating world-class payment infrastructure to help serve customer needs better. This includes digital wallets, NFC enabled smart payments on smartphones and wearable devices and much more.

While the physical infrastructure and complexity for such smart payment solutions are less, there is a considerably high level of technical prowess involved in facilitating the solution seamlessly. Sensitive financial data of customers has to be managed securely as any event of a breach will likely result in lawsuits and tarnished reputation which may be difficult to recover. Moreover, this sensitive financial data may at times be shared with your businesses vendors as well for settlement of invoices, etc. More the number of stakeholders, greater is the security assurance needed for the digital payment infrastructure. This trend will be crucial when a small business starts to grow global ambitions as today’s technology allows you to scale rapidly with virtual platforms like e-commerce sites and partners.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

1. Data Privacy

We already covered a portion of this in the payment trends section but considering the rapid scale in which consumer data is generated and consumed by businesses, data privacy is a trend and force to reckon with. Today, every single piece of information be it past interactions of a customer with your business or their preferences in investing or their personal and social media interests are all acquired and analyzed for arriving at business decisions. While this is a good thing for business, several users have repeatedly voiced their concerns on the growing trend of sensitive customer data becoming exposed to fraudulent and inappropriate proceedings. Increasing compliance requirements like GDPR and other international privacy laws will impact the way in which small businesses operate using consumer data.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that the digital systems and business processes that handle sensitive customer information have strict guidelines for privacy preservation as fines for any mishaps could literally throw your business out of operations. Data privacy policies and tools needed to safeguard customer data are an important asset for all businesses irrespective of their business domain and geography.

If you are a small business owner, then the 5 trends that we covered in this blog are of prime importance. They can very well define the future of how your business will perform in a highly competitive market. With the vast array of digital tools available to support various facets of your business, it is quite natural to get confused about where to start investing and exploring. This is where INFINCE comes to the rescue. With cloud-based integrated solutions, INFINCE can bring together the robustness of suite solution for enhanced productivity and efficiency.

INFINCE – Build Your Team & Collaborate

Infince is a cloud platform built to run your business in a completely new way via information technology. This cloud-based software comes fully-supported, hassle-free, user-friendly and very much cost effective. Having Infince at your small business is like taking your business to the next step by simplifying the way you work and concentrate on your business growth. The efficient functionality of INFINCE combined with its user-friendly technology and flexible features allows you to manage everything from the simplest to the most complex, in a convenient and comfortable manner.

Why should a small business opt for Infince?

“A big business starts small,” said Richard Branson. The road to becoming large-scale for broadening services and reach begins with finding and deploying the right technology solutions. Technologies like the cloud have turned out a major disruptor and undergone widespread adoption by businesses, big and small.

Compared to on-premise technology, cloud platforms have global accessibility, secure infrastructure, and reduced spending. INFINCE brings the cloud advantage within reach of small businesses through its –

• Simplified Cloud-based Technology – Set up your own website and email with just a few clicks.
• Efficient Office and Collaboration Tools – Collaborate efficiently, share documents quickly, and bring your workforce together from different locations.
• Secure & Private Preconfigured Cloud – Privacy and security for your data on secure private virtual servers.
• Curated Applications Marketplace – Click and buy business applications from a growing list of applications including CRM, CMS, and HRM solutions, hosted on secure cloud environments and dedicated to your need.
• Single Sign-On Accessibility  – Single Sign-On enables you to have unified access to all your business software.
• Concierge IT Services – Enjoy seamless IT with hosting, maintenance, and updates managed by a dedicated team.
• Seamless User Interface – Intuitive user experience for beginners.
• Enhanced Mobility – User mobility with mobile apps for smartphones and tablets with white labeling.
• 24/7 Technology Support – Highly dedicated support team with an email, live chat, and phone support.

Related Reading: INFINCE Presented with the 2018 Great User Experience Award

How to Deploy Infince in your Business

The process displayed below will help you to know how easily INFINCE can be set up and made ready for use in your organization.

Collaboration Tools in Infince

Infince is a one-stop solution that integrates an array of tools with the capability to do multiple things.

Applications – On Purchase

Apart from the collaboration tools, you have the option to purchase applications for specific business needs.

How will Infince Help your Business?

Small businesses need to execute their projects in a very efficient and economical way. They can boost their productivity and efficiency with INFINCE as their preferred technology partner. INFINCE helps project teams get their work done faster, no matter how or where they work. The cloud-based solution brings dispersed teams together as they work through planning, managing tasks, allocating, tracking, document management and other functions.

Collaborative Work Environment

• Collaborate with all the team members. (i.e. internal, external, remote, and distributed team members)
• Virtual workplace enhances collaborative project planning and better work streams
• Real-time chat and communication with team members
• Manage, share, and sync project calendars with personal calendars of members
• Helps individual team members keep commitments by having personal task lists and deadline reminders
• Conduct online meetings
• Centralized data, documents, and contacts allow cross sharing between the team
• Access virtual workplace to view project information through mobile/computer

Automated Planning and Scheduling

• Create virtual project teams with geographically dispersed members (i.e. internal, external, remote, and distributed team members)
• Better define and manage project requirements
• Efficiently schedule task duration, milestones, and deadlines

Digital Asset Management

• Keep everyone updated with version control, change tracking, and document history
• Easily secure file sharing between all team members from different devices
• Manage and archive project files securely in a structured and accessible way
• Have a good document repository for uploads and attachments

Server Properties

• Managed, private and secure server for everyone
• Separate dedicated server for each organization
• Flexible and convenient to use by all
• Stable and consistent
• Back-up options

User management

• User permissions and roles
• User Roles
• User Groups

How to Manage Tasks using Infince

• List, assign and prioritize tasks based on deadlines and dependencies
• Update task list status, organize, track and make visible to the team
• Personalized task management for individual team members
• Ability to oversee the tasks that are overdue, ongoing and planned
• View and analyze day-to-day tasks and progress across teams and projects
• Execute multiple projects with better quality, on time and efficiently

Related Reading: A Guide to Effective Cloud Migration

Who Will be Benefited Most Out of Infince?

• Construction Firms – A construction company to share client estimates, project plan, layout between the employees and clients as well as assign tasks to employees.
• Legal Services Firms – A legal firm to share case details between the lawyers and clients.
• Small scale Manufacturing – Small scale manufacturing companies to assign tasks, share documents, communicate between teams, and view product timelines.
• Marketing & Consulting Firms – Marketing and consulting firms to manage and collaborate tasks on different campaigns and project. Allows task scheduling, monitor time spent and measure ROI on all marketing projects.
• Health Clinics – Clinics can use INFINCE to manage the appointments of all the patients and store the patient’s history.
• Software Firms – For document sharing, task assignment, project management handling client calls, real-time chat, and marketing.
• R&D Companies – R&D can have project management tools to ensure the smooth transfer of knowledge and technology to other groups or departments involved in innovation, file transfer and file management.
• Insurance Firms – Insurance companies to enhance their performance, more products can be sold and retain customers by keeping the project on track, easy transfer of lead details, schedule tasks between employees and much more.

As a secure and economical cloud platform, INFINCE is the right choice for businesses running on limited capital. With its potential application stretching across a swathe of different industries, INFINCE brings the simplicity of the cloud and resources configured for optimal performance that elevates workforce productivity.  Get in touch with us today to deploy INFINCE at your business.

CRM systems have come a long way from their origins as contact management systems for storing and retrieving contact information. Enterprises across-the-board now regard it as a valuable and indispensable tool to not just manage and improve relationships with contacts but to manage the entire gamut of customer relationship management.

The nature of CRM has also witnessed a tectonic shift. Cloud-based CRM now dominates with 87% of the total market share, a big jump from just 12% in 2007. The overwhelming preference for cloud-based CRM is for good reasons.

1. The Cloud Facilitates Big Savings in Cost and Effort

On-premises CRM entails huge upfront investment in hardware and servers. The cloud CRM vendor absorbs such investment and offers a pay-as-you-go payment model for clients. Businesses pay only a monthly charge, converting their capital-expense (CAPEX) costs into an easy attributable operational expense (OPEX.) Still better, the CRM becomes easily scalable, with the ability to add capacity easily as and when required, and scale-down during downtime.

The spillover monetary benefits of hosting CRM in the cloud includes hassle-free maintenance, no troubleshooting, and freedom from having to upgrade the CRM periodically. These tasks are done by the vendor, and the enterprise can, in fact, do without single IT personnel in-house.

Cloud-based systems are quick and painless to deploy as well. The set-up is as simple as paying the subscription fees and logging in. Cloud-based CRM systems tend to prioritize ease of use and accessibility, meaning easier learning curve for end users and lesser training costs for enterprises.

2. Cloud Enables Anytime, Anywhere Access

The biggest advantage of cloud-based CRM is anytime, anywhere access. The data and the software reside in the cloud, and accessible through convenient mobile apps or other front end software, without constraints of geography or time. The ability to access the CRM through intuitive mobile apps is arguably the single biggest benefit of cloud-based CRM considering 65% of employees achieve their sales quota when using mobile CRM, and only 22% of employees achieve their sales quota when mobile CRM isn’t used.

The anytime anywhere access make cloud hosted CRM ideal for today’s fast-paced and highly competitive world, where opportunities exist only for a short while and have to be seized at the instant. Opportunities come knocking rarely. With a cloud-based CRM ready, the executive is ready to seize the opportunity by having all information and resources in his smartphone, regardless of whether he is at the airport, a spa, a business meeting or out for lunch.

3. Cloud Brings Integrated Data Management

A cloud-based CRM not just centralizes data in one place, but is also handy to integrate information from external, disparate sources, such as media activity, project management information, accounting information, and more. Dedicated cloud integration tools facilitate the seamless sharing of data from disparate sources.

The integrated and consolidated processing of information prevents gaps in information or understanding when dealing with a customer across multiple touch points. Marketers and other users have access to real-time or latest data, synced from the cloud server whenever online.

4. Cloud-Based CRM is Always Updated

Upgrading on-premises CRM is a hassle, requiring modification of the code, and provisioning everything again. With a cloud-based CRM, the vendor takes up the task. The vendor is more likely to upgrade the CRM and co-opt new features very fast, to pre-empt losing customers to competitor products. Cloud-based CRM vendors are also more likely to innovate, to offer better features and functionality, to differentiate themselves from competitors.

5. Cloud CRM Facilitates Seamless Collaboration

A cloud-based CRM doubles up as an effective collaboration tool, offering remote and off-site employees a reliable and robust medium to connect and collaborate with their team and customers alike. The Cloud CRM offers a common interface enabling team members to share data and updates that contribute to the end objective of increasing sales and customer satisfaction. International teams especially can collaborate effectively across time-zones.

6. Cloud Offers Robust Security More Often Than Not

Security is the literally the million dollar question staring at enterprises in the wake of heightened security breaches. A 2018 study by Juniper Research estimates cybercriminals to steal an estimated 33 billion records in 2023, up from an already whopping 12 billion records in 2018.

Contrary to perception, the cloud is more secure than on-premises systems. Any decent cloud-based CRM offers robust security, free from the usual suspects of out-of-date software. The CRM is the bread and butter rather than an appendix, the vendor is more likely to and is able to take the proper precautions, with dedicated staff looking to discovering and closing weak security points.

CRM also lessens the risk of system failure, with dedicated servers and redundant databases minimizing the risk of loss of data or downtime. Businesses have the flexibility to negotiate an SLA service-level agreement with an agreed upon level of service, including the acceptable “downtime,” beyond which compensation sets in.

While the cloud-based CRM offers several advantages, it is by no means a magic wand to success. Success depends on the skillful implementation, overcoming challenges such as retaining control of data, effective collaboration with the vendor’s support system and provisioning adequate bandwidth to access the cloud seamlessly. With INFINCE make it all possible. Call us today to learn how INFINCE can help you battle business challenges with infinite cloud.