How can businesses enhance workplace collaboration in the digital era?

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crucial driver of change in recent human history. One of the most prominent disruptions it brought about was the closure of offices and workplaces worldwide, pushing millions of employees to work remotely from their homes as much as possible. Organizations that have long followed conservative policies and restricted employees from availing work from home options were forced to transition into an utterly remote mode of working in a matter of days. A year passed and what leading research and survey reports are pointing out is that the remote work culture that pushed its way into the spotlight in 2020 is likely to remain at large in the new normal. A Gartner survey of top CFOs revealed that 74% of respondents were planning to permanently shift a section of their employees to a complete remote mode of working even after the pandemic.

Firms opting for a majority remote work policy can leverage several benefits such as:

• Improved work-life balance for employees
• More productive work hours
• Lower operations cost with very little physical office space utilization required
• Better talent sourcing as remote work allows a global hiring scale. 

However, as firms move into remote work operations, the question of building a team culture arises. Many firms are wondering how to improve collaboration among their employees when most of the staff work remotely.

The answer to this problem lies predominantly in two parts. 

• The first part lies in creating a cultural shift to make your employees more accommodative of remote work demands and act responsibly with the freedom of flexibility granted. 
• The second part is empowering employees with the right digital workplace tools to help them succeed with their daily routine when working from anywhere. 

On this note, let us explore the top five ways to help employees improve workplace collaboration.

Read more: 3 Ways a Workplace App Helps Manage Your Business During COVID-19

1. Streamline communication

The most critical aspect of achieving collaboration efficiency in the workplace is establishing a seamless communication framework. Should leaders address employees from time to time, peer-to-peer communication, or external client or vendor communication, there should be a robust communication ecosystem. It should comprise a powerful email system, instant messaging capability, intranet facility for employee engagement, feedback surveys and corporate announcements, business phone systems functioning over VOIP technology, and so on. 

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

Organizations need to define and implement an effective communication policy that outlines a framework that guides staff to find the right personnel for a query and the right medium to reach out to them. This will enable better and more productive communication, especially when employees are not working together in a physical space.

Download White Paper: How a Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance

2. Enable productive meetings

In almost all workplaces, tasks are often driven to completion through effective teamwork. For team members to remain in sync with each other and other dependent teams in a larger project exercise, there is a need to facilitate effective meetings or discussion sessions periodically. Daily stand-up meetings and monthly or weekly review meetings are a few examples of sessions that team managers can plan to foster a unified work approach. When remote work mode comes into the picture, enterprises must on-board digital workplace platforms like Infince that allow seamless audio and video conferencing capabilities. These would enable online meetings and discussions to happen more engagingly and interactively. Besides, colleagues can also get a chance to see each other once in a while which is an excellent social culture that promotes healthy collaboration in the absence of physical office activities like teatime chats and team lunch breaks.

Read more: 10 Ways to Deal with Modern Workplace Distractions and Chaos

3. Seamless information access

Once communication policies are set in place, the next important aspect in facilitating an improved collaboration experience in the workplace is seamless information access. Employees may require access to critical organizational information such as contacts of other employees or customer information, access to marketing or technical collateral for work tasks and customer engagement, information such as policies or IT guidelines, and much more. To promote seamless information access, organizations must ensure that they have a centralized information repository on their internal workforce collaboration platform. It should promote secure file access, exchange, and privileged access provisioning to ensure that confidential information is guarded against unauthorized access. Information access needs to be ensured from multiple devices such as laptops, smartphones, and from anywhere.

4. Empower employees with productivity tools

In the digital era, employees need access to multiple productivity tools to manage their workloads. These may include document tools, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and report generation tools to ease their daily task effort. Enterprises must provide seamless access for employees to such productivity tools and ensure that these tools offer instant virtual collaboration so that different employees can work together using these tools and collectively drive tasks to completion. It will be vital in a scenario where a majority of the workforce is engaged in remote work.

Read more: An 8-Point Checklist to Enhance The Modern-Day Digital Workplace

5. Enable efficient project and task management

Another helpful feature or productivity tool to have in a workplace is an efficient task manager, which will enable seamless coordination between different dependent teams or individuals and help manage responsibility while transparently improving collaboration efficiency. Team members need to be aware of how their task progress impacts the work of others. They also need to know the dependencies that should be managed transparently. 

Read more: 5 Ways to Secure Your Meetings When Using Video Conferencing Software

As businesses continue to navigate new norms in the digital era, workplace collaboration becomes a significant pillar for overall business success. This is where Infince can be the one-stop enterprise management solution that helps manage people and serves as a robust digital backbone for your business. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like Infince

Infince covers all aspects from operations to customer relationship management and employee management with its wide range of enterprise apps available for each function. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can improve workplace collaboration by on-boarding Infince into your digital ecosystem. If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful work collaboration software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

Why should small businesses invest in a cloud business phone system

In the past, a business phone system was not a small business priority. But did you know that nearly 65% of consumers prefer to interact with a business over a phone call rather than utilizing a web contact form? As companies rush to find more ways to engage their loyal customers, keeping their contact options flexible and open to customer demands is a critical area that they cannot ignore. In this context, having a business phone number is essential as customers may want to get in touch with you directly for various reasons. Traditional telephonic communication systems have transitioned into their digital avatars. Today VOIP based telecommunication is the backbone of every small business phone system out there.

The latest and most trending internet-enabled telephonic communication infrastructure for today’s digital-savvy small businesses is a cloud business phone system. The trend is attributed to the ROI that cloud business phone systems can provide to small businesses. Cloud business phone systems help companies deliver a seamless experience for customers to get in touch with them. 

Let us explore the top 7 benefits that a small business can enjoy if they switch over to a cloud business phone system:

1. Global access

A telephone system managed in a cloud environment enables businesses to globalize their communication infrastructure. It allows the staff to utilize the business phone for communication from anywhere in the world in just a few clicks. All it takes is a few configuration steps to be done on your cloud phone system. In a matter of minutes, your business phone system will be ready for use in any country you may shift your operating base to or open up new offices. All data related to your contacts, workflow mappings of different departments, or executives can be seamlessly moved to your new work location without any effort.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

2. Cost-efficient

As we all know, cloud business phone systems rely on VOIP technology to make phone calls from the internet. Voice is transferred as data packets and not as analog signals found in traditional line-based telephonic infrastructure. Voice services over the internet are relatively inexpensive irrespective of the geographies connected through the line for customer interactions. Availing a cloud business phone system also allows small businesses to avoid hefty license fees as they can opt for economic subscription plans that best suit their needs.

3. Simplified infrastructure

A cloud business phone system doesn’t require enterprises to have physical telecommunication infrastructure components like a PBX box, telephones, and operational lines. Also, they do not require office premises to be modified to lay cables and wires to support a large user base of executives accessing different official phone numbers. The cloud system offers all employees a simple one-click call from their smartphones, and the cloud service provider handles all call routing, network optimization, and traffic management.

Read more: 8 Ways Cloud Automation Significantly Improves Your Legacy IT Operations

4. Flexibility of scale

Small businesses always need technology that can flexibly align with their growth prospects. Cloud telephone systems allow enterprises to seamlessly scale up the number of people who can access the business phone system with just a few clicks and no physical infrastructure additions. They can increase the number of subscribers in their monthly or yearly billing contract signed with a service provider. The same applies if they want to scale down operations as well.

5. Device independence

With a cloud-based business phone system, employees can make calls from any of their devices such as smartphones or laptops or any other work gear and have the recipient receive the call from the official business correspondence number. All call features such as recording, analytics, reporting, etc., can be done on the cloud. Companies can even route incoming calls to an employee’s number to another employee easily in the event of leave or absence.

6. Limitless geographical extension

One of the highlights of using a cloud-based VOIP business phone system is that it gives businesses the freedom to establish a local presence in a country with a business phone system tagged to a local number. They can do it remotely from anywhere globally, thereby empowering businesses to expand their reach to international customers seamlessly.

7. Recovery and security

With a cloud-based business phone system, your business’s entire telephone system has a virtual infrastructure hosted and secured in a cloud environment. In the wake of a natural calamity or a sudden migration of office space to a new city or locality, your business phone system can be up and running from the new area in a matter of seconds.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of Infince for Business Owners and Employees

As the world is increasingly transitioning to digital-first interactions, keeping your telecommunication system agile and flexible is vital for sustainable business growth. This is where investing in a cloud business phone system can make a tangible return on your investment. Get in touch with us to see how Infince can help create the perfect digital backbone for your small business by bringing all your enterprise applications, telecommunication, and collaboration capabilities under one roof on a SaaS model. 

Reinvent Your Legacy IT Operations with Cloud Automation

Cloud automation tools are capable of making digital transformation realistic compared to legacy IT and software platforms.

Conventional software is usually installed to work on virtual machines (VMs) and desktops. Whereas Infince was built in the Cloud and is known for representing the next generation of smart automation platforms that can significantly boost your legacy IT operations.

Infince allows businesses to effortlessly automate recurring, manual jobs such as email handling, systems updates, data processing, and documents management. Today, organizations are increasingly embracing cloud applications. However, some businesses are still unconvinced with cloud-based solutions. 

Are you among those organizations that don’t know much about cloud automation’s business benefits and its role in accelerating digital transformation? This post will help you gain a clear picture.

Cloud automation helps companies improve their legacy IT operations

1. Economical cost of ownership

Cloud automation allows you to bypass the maintenance cost, which is preordained when you own hardware. In addition to hardware costs, organizations also need to employ more human resources for installing, troubleshooting, securing, and upgrading the hardware. All these add up to the total cost of ownership. Now, it will be easy for you to understand the cost-effectiveness of cloud automation.

2. Centralized authority

Infince’s enterprise cloud platform offers a unified environment for your organization. It helps you organize, control, and audit the automation activity throughout the organization more effectively. You can also easily manage the access rights and multi-layered permissions at the organization, user, object, group, and data levels.

Read more: Top 4 Advantages of Centralized IT Administration for Your Business

3. Security and reliability

According to a report, more than 90% of businesses witnessed a significant security improvement when they adopted cloud automation solutions. Infince has the potential of working with both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to offer unmatched cloud-hosting and related services. These organizations provide an abundance of resources strictly for cyber-security compared to a legacy IT department, which comprises physical and network security.

Infince offers not only multi-tenant hosting options but also facilitates security with single-tenant hosting plans. It implies that you can own a dedicated, isolated account that manages your data with utmost exclusivity. All data on Infince is encrypted in transit and at rest through enterprise-grade security norms. Infince has completed HIPAA and SOC 2 tests, audited by a third-party auditor. It indicates that the servers of Infince are placed in high-security data centers.

Read more: 5 Features of Infince that will Transform The Way You Work

4. Low risk and swift execution

Infince is capable of setting up a new customer account in no time. Once created, a user needs to sign in using their web browsers and start structuring automation. With the Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing model, any organization can begin development at a reasonable cost and invest further only after achieving success and ROI on automation. This contrasts significantly with in-house installed cloud automation tools, which usually demand substantial cost and time to get started.

5. Orchestration in cloud 

A business process includes numerous departments apart from employees, such as customers, suppliers, contractors, partners, job candidates, and third-party associates. Having a cloud automation tool like Infince that offers top-notch orchestration in Cloud, these various parties can easily contribute to the automated workflow by completing necessary forms, signing documents, and uploading files. Such an orchestration in the cloud allows you to easily automate the overall process, not just the steps that occur within your organization’s particular area.

6. Remote management

Usually, the most traditional automation software is installed on PCs, but that is not the case with Infince. Using a web browser, you can access Infince. This implies that Infince is compatible with Macs and PCs and can also be operated with a smartphone, credit to its remarkable responsive design. As today’s employees prefer to work outside the office, your automation software must be capable of keeping up no matter where the employees are or what device they are using.

Read more: 5 Ways an Integrated Cloud Platform is Beneficial for Your Small Business

7. Constant improvement with zero upgrades

Being a cloud platform, Infince ensures that a business is continually reaping its latest version’s benefits. You don’t have to install or update the software on your computer manually, and your end-users do not have to wait for upgrades. Moreover, Infince releases new features at regular intervals and adds more features with every release, ensuring growth in efficiency for your organization.

8. Cloud automation tools are scalable

Cloud automation platforms are scalable almost in any manner you want them to. For example, if you wish to store large data sets in data tables of Infince, you need not concern about increasing hard drive space as Infince is rightly equipped to manage that for you. The more departments and users you bring to the platform, the system management actions and centralized governance will minimize friction and manual effort. The SaaS model of Infince is designed to surge pricing as a fraction of the value you realize, meaning you always achieve a greater ROI.

Read more: 3 Strong Reasons for Your Business to Embrace Cloud-based IT Services

Final thoughts

To transform your organization digitally, you must implement a cloud automation solution that is economical, offers swift deployment, gets connected easily, and is designed to adjust as you grow. Infince’s reliable cloud automation tool makes digital transformation more attainable for your organization and ensures to improve the legacy of IT operations.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of Infince for Business Owners and Employees

In the modern business world, automation has turned out to be a boon for organizations as it provides better resource utilization, IT operations, and workload distribution. These are the reasons that today’s enterprises are moving towards cloud automation tools at such a fast pace. If you are also an entrepreneur striving to automate your business operations, the automated solutions of Infince can turn out to be advantageous for you. Contact us to learn more. 

Want to Tame the Chaos of the Modern Workplace? Here’s How!

Technology makes our lives better and simpler. Still, there’s no denying billions of hours are wasted each day staring at smartphones, surfing the internet for no reason, or merely browsing social media channels. This phenomenon is, indeed, widely visible at workplaces, too. Today, the modern digital workplace is facing a universal challenge- how to deal with workplace chaos.

What is a modern workplace? It is, ideally, an amalgamation of a digital and physical space combined in such a way to meet the requirements of the end-users and your business. 

A modern workplace ensures that it eliminates obstacles such as:

• Poor communication
• Packed office spaces
• Clunky processes
• Beleaguered IT departments
• Inflexible contracts and software licenses
• Frustrated user-base
• Outdated service offerings
• Lack of cross-platform services

To boldly move forward into the future, you must handle the above chaos effectively.

Read more: An 8-Point Checklist to Enhance The Modern-Day Digital Workplace 

10 ways to deal with modern workplace distractions and chaos

Even highly-qualified and skilled employees, regardless of good intentions, struggle with workday overload – competing deadlines, attending meetings, bombarded by emails, constant phone calls, digital distractions, and never-ending office drama. Contemplating these – would you call it an ideal modern workplace? Is it the best environment to work and be productive?

Let’s dive deep and unearth the secrets to tune out the modern workplace distractions constructively.

1. Focus on creating a positive, harmonious, and professional work environment

Wouldn’t you agree – conflict and disgruntled employees are the significant reasons behind the modern workplace chaos? Creating a positive work environment is the need of the hour. To set up a professional environment, appreciate your employees when they accomplish good work and have an outlet for employees to share and address their concerns.

2. Ensure transparent and clear communication

“Communication is the real work of leadership,” and it is vital to understand what’s going on with your employees and what measures should be taken to tackle their concerns and the chaos.

Download White Paper: Adapting to The Changing Face of Enterprise Collaboration 

3. Unchain yourself from email compulsion

A constant watch on your emails is undoubtedly going to make you less productive. Monitoring personal emails excessively during office hours will kill remote workplace productivity. An alternate method to check your emails would be checking them at scheduled times. Or, concentrate on customizing your email to show only the urgent stuff.

4. Maintain a work journal

Having a work journal at your desk would come in handy organizing your daily routine – how much time you spend on long-term projects, how much time you dedicate to administrative tasks, and so on. This way, you will know when you are most productive and when you are engrossed in trivial stuff.

5. Focus on long-term goals or end goals

Not only will you have to maintain an open-door to your employees, but you must also remind them to focus on the long-term goals. This will minimize the confusion, doubts, and speculations during the short-term.

6. Define business hierarchy

It’s pertinent to have a clearly defined business hierarchy to tame the modern workplace chaos. For example, keep a deft employee in the middle, just like a meat shield, to answer your employees on your behalf. This will, to a great extent, reduce the chaos, thus boosting productivity.

7. Formulate a realistic business plan

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Having a business with ambiguous plans and outlines will only add more pathos, leading to your business’s chaos and failure. 

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

8. Adopt proactive mindset and ponder over productivity

Having a proactive mindset and taking proactive steps will help you overcome the chaos and get the most out of your day. Instead of turning away from the common workday concerns like numerous emails and meetings, increasing workloads, immediate resignation of a supervisor, and changing priorities, you can focus on the following measures with a proactive mindset:

• Set up an uninterrupted work time
• Accomplish important tasks first
• Don’t overwork yourself
• Take breaks at regular intervals to keep your mind fresh and active

9. Recognize seductive office drama and stop it from creeping your peace of mind

You have to recognize and become aware of the office drama (or even the slightest distraction from work, such as gossiping, eavesdropping, spreading rumors, or sharing opinions without verifying the facts). You must assess your dedication to the drama and let your colleague tell you if it hurts work quality.

10. Improved self-awareness will tune out chaos from work

You must be aware of your positive mindset, mood, emotional level, and physical energy and pay attention to your zest, enthusiasm, reactions, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts while gearing up for your workday. Also, keep the challenges, priorities, and bright spots in the loop as these would help you reduce the chaos of the modern digital workplace.

Do you flaunt an integral urge to be distracted easily? If yes, it will be an arduous task to concentrate on when you are mentally exhausted. You have to reduce the number of decisions you make every day by letting industry-trained and adroit professionals take good care of you and your enterprise platforms. So, what’s the solution?

With Infince, you get to simplify decision-making and re-imagine your business with robust business management software. Infince is your go-to digital workplace platform for all your business needs.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of Infince for Business Owners and Employees If you are excited to get on-board and try the powerful business management software, we would like to invite you for a 30-day free trial here.

We know: it can be hard to get a visually appealing website up and running, especially when your time, budget, and design skills are limited. Here’s an offer from Infince perfect for new companies: a free, professionally designed website! 

Sign Up for the Infince Workplace and we will design your website for FREE! Yes, you heard that right. Our experienced designers will work with you to deliver an attention-grabbing website to market your company on the internet. Our marketing technician will show you how you use SEO (search engine optimization). SEO makes your site findable. If needed, the Infince tech experts will take care of the technical parts of registering your business’ domain name, too.

We will host your new website on your own dedicated WordPress server in the Infince Cloud. (WordPress itself is free, but cloud server hosting options start at $11 per month.) WordPress, the most popular website hosting platform in the world, is a powerful foundation for internet marketing.

More good news: As an Infince client you won’t have to worry about the technical details of managing the WordPress server – the Infince team handles that for you. You start by choosing a base design for your website from available predefined templates that we then customize for you. All you need to do is create, and as needed edit, the marketing content on your website using the straightforward editing tools that WordPress provides. Get stuck? Help is always just a click away.

Of course, the free website design services are just one of many benefits you get from your Infince subscription. The Infince Digital Workplace provides your team with customizable dashboards, collaboration apps, business email, video meetings, concierge support, and access to special software such as CRM and Project Management from a wide range sources.

Establish an online presence with no technical hassles. Try Infince today!

Kindly note the terms and conditions listed below:

• The website can have up to 10 pages.
• You need to provide the text content.
• You need to provide images. We can suggest some free images.
• We allow multiple reviews, but you must complete all setup and design work in a week.
• The offer is not applicable in the 30-day free trial.
• This offer is of limited duration. Act now!

How to Improve Your Intranet for Better Employee Experience

Technology advancements and modern communication tools have changed the entire landscape of employee engagement and workplace collaboration. While intranets have been at the center of teamwork and business communication for years, they are seemingly competing with more contemporary technologies these days to offer the same level of seamless experience they did a couple of years ago. Besides, as today’s digital-first age heavily relies on a remote work culture with distributed teams, it is crucial to reconceptualize the intranet infrastructure and make it more efficient to stay competitive and relevant in the industry.

Below are ten ways to reimagine your intranet and ensure better employee engagement and collaboration in your organization.

Read more: 5 Tips to Analyze and Select the Right Business Intranet Solution

1. Focus on your usability

You need to re-design your intranet with modern features by focusing on its usability. Understand how your teams use the company intranet to collaborate with colleagues, find new information, and perform other tasks like filling the paperwork. Your goal should be to facilitate all these activities while ensuring that your intranet is easy to use and integrates with the latest tools that your employees need. Likewise, it should also have an inherent search function to let everyone find the information they are looking for quickly.

2. Keep it aligned with your business objectives

Your company intranet should not just cater to the organization’s communication needs but also help to realize broader business goals. You need to identify how your intranet can solve potential company challenges and how it can contribute to your enterprise success. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to track your business performance and progress. It also helps create actionable insights for redefining your communications strategy.

Case Study: How Fingent Achieved Breakthroughs in Collaboration with Infince Digital Workplace

3. Bring mobile devices into play

Remote workers can collaborate in a much better way when you integrate mobile devices into the intranet infrastructure. With mobile-ready intranet solutions, your employees can connect to the central system to access the data and information needed to perform their duties from anywhere they want. This multichannel approach also boosts the reach of your company communications and allows you to engage your employees on multiple touch points such as instant messaging, news feed snippets, video calling, etc.

Read more: How SMBs Can Overcome Challenges to Build a Mobile-First Workplace

4. Promote two-way communication

Traditionally, intranets were used to receive messages but not as a tool that facilitated two-way communication. As modern all-in-one collaboration platforms go beyond being an information and announcements hub, you need to upgrade your intranet system to support bidirectional conversations to make the most of it. It can serve as a secure and seamless channel for your employees to interact and even run brainstorming sessions on new projects. Having comprehensive intranet profiles can work like social media networks.

5. Build a strong company culture

One of the fundamental elements of digital transformation is transforming the traditional workplace culture into a more collaborative, digitally-powered environment. It means you need to reimagine your intranet to meet those goals and build strong company culture by conveying your mission and business values to the entire team. When coupled with features like performance objectives, employee recognition, and a thorough onboarding process, your intranet can lead to defining thriving company culture.

6. Think beyond decentralized communication

Decentralizing business communications is an integral part of modern-day internal collaboration platforms. It takes the unconventional route of allowing all employees to be responsible for their intranet profiles instead of the core team managing everything. Decentralizing communication will instill a sense of freedom and independence within your company while allowing coworkers to interact with each other in their departments more actively. Eventually, this will lead to stronger bonds between employees, which is a crucial factor that drives improved efficiency and business success.

Read more: 5 Best Practices To Enable Seamless Communication For Your Remote Workforce

7. Manage the content wisely

Creating highly-engaging content has always helped businesses to capture the attention of their employees and ensure better engagement. No matter how the times have changed, content that provides value to your workforce will still be a decisive element in determining your company’s success. However, the way people consume content has significantly changed, so you need to consider how your employees interact with the content you deliver through the intranet to create a robust strategy.

8. Improve the search capabilities

As mentioned previously, improving the search function to let users find the relevant content without any hassle is an integral part of making your intranet more user-friendly. Therefore, you need to revamp your intranet’s traditional and outdated structure and make it simpler for your employees to search for content no matter which device they are using. This will facilitate seamless communication across the organization and make workflow management more efficient.

9. Publish personalized and targeted content

Targeted and personalized content makes it relatively easy to keep employees engaged and motivated. Several studies have found that targeted channels lead to nearly twice the click-through rates. So if you see that your employees use the company app more often than opening their emails, then directing your focus to in-app messaging can be a more efficient way to meet your needs. You can do this by segregating your workforce into different types of audience segments and then creating custom content for each segment.

Download White Paper: Reinventing the Corporate Intranet with Employee Experience at the Center

10. Add a workforce collaboration platform

The best way to optimize your intranet and make the most of the internal communications is by bringing a workplace collaboration tool like Infince to the mix. Work collaboration tools like Infince will boost your intranet system’s capabilities and functions to more actively deliver company news and information. At the same time, it will ensure that your employees get all the tools they need to interact and collaborate on a project effectively. Moreover, an all-in-one workplace collaboration platform can also give you a unified dashboard to monitor and manage everything.

Read more: 5 Benefits Of Having A Centralized Employee Dashboard In Your Business

The above-stated are some of the fundamental ways to transform your intranet into a more effective and collaborative platform that keeps your workforce engaged and motivated to deliver their best performance. As modern-day challenges need adopting innovative and forward-thinking approaches, it is high time to reimagine your intranet with the right upgrades and ensure optimal employee engagement for superior operational efficiency.

Whether your team is working together or remotely, Infince makes sure that your people can effectively communicate, connect, and engage seamlessly! Infince’s intranet, powered by shareable dashboards, blogs, wiki, communication apps, and productivity tools, can transform employee communications across your organization. Contact us to learn more. 

Guide to building a digital-first small business in 2021

2020 was a year of realizations for businesses around the world. When health scares like the COVID-19 pandemic hits without warning, life’s normalcy gets disrupted beyond imagination. Companies need to adapt to new ways of working in a matter of days. For smaller businesses with little or no contingency plans in place, the pandemic was an eye-opener. Studies earlier have shown that nearly 80% of small businesses in the US did not take full advantage of the capabilities of digital and productivity tools available in the market for their use. 

Download White Paper: How a Digital Workplace Streamlines Business Performance 

In today’s digital economy, consumer behavior is directly influenced by the rapid proliferation of digital services and connected devices. There is no escaping the digital transformation realm for small businesses as the pandemic proved that digital supremacy is an inevitable need for survival and not an operational luxury for them. On this note, let us examine the top 4 crucial technology trends that a small business cannot afford to ignore in 2021.

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

1. Autonomous Customer Service

Once relied heavily on by customers, traditional services are moving into self-service portals wherein customers can configure and transact independently. There is a rising demand for instant and autonomous customer service. Nearly 62% of US consumers prefer talking to a chatbot while interacting with a business. AI-enabled chatbots offer instant and more data-driven support decisions to consumers when they interact. In a traditional setting, customers are forced to wait long to connect with a human support associate and explain their whole problem. Often, customers will be diverted to another department and the story of waiting and explaining repeats. With autonomous chatbot and voice assistants, most queries receive replies instantly. Also, precise data is collected and transferred to a desk executive when connecting with a human support agent.

2. Integrating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

It is hard to find businesses without a dedicated website today. Considering that a good majority of your potential customers find out about you from the internet, building a website is necessary for any business. But today, nearly 50.8% of global internet traffic comes through mobile phones. People browsing your website on their mobile phones expect information pages to load as quickly as possible. For this, small businesses must deploy AMP principles in their web development to ensure that every web page offers a seamless loading and viewing experience in mobile browsers. Any delays in page loads can create unsatisfactory experiences for visitors, and your bounce rates will go up if AMP is not incorporated in your web experiences.

3. Marketing Personalization

Do you know that 80% of consumers are likely to do business with a brand that offers them personalized experiences? Personalization begins from the first step that businesses take to reach out to their customers, which is marketing. Rather than shooting out mass email campaigns, sticking flyers and billboards across the city, small businesses can utilize the vast plethora of modern marketing platforms to roll out customized and highly personal campaigns to attract the right audience to their stores or websites. Customers want only the right content to be delivered to their mailboxes to make more informed decisions. Small businesses need to use AI-driven personalized marketing platforms that can quickly identify interest patterns and deploy relevant messaging and recommendations to the correct customer to convince them of a purchasing decision quickly.

Read more: Key Predictions on How Workplace Technology and Culture Will Evolve in 2020 & Beyond 

4. Seamless Omni-channel experience

Irrespective of the digital channel that consumers use to reach out, small businesses must deliver an omnichannel experience across their digital landscape. From seamless transactions to better and intelligent recommendations and improved agility in back-office administration, small businesses need to have powerful digital platforms deployed across their operations’ length and breadth. Companies cannot leave their customers lurking in the dark, waiting for information as the competition might take advantage and lure them away with better experiences.

With the rising demand for faster and more digital-friendly experiences by consumers, small businesses should streamline their business process automation and management exercise. They need to efficiently coordinate workflows in different departments, such as finance, supply chain, logistics, HR, marketing, and sales. Additionally, they need to ensure a responsive digital infrastructure for their front-facing internet assets as well. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like Infince 

Using intelligent business management platforms like Infince is necessary for small businesses to compete in the new digital era. From building a robust digital backend for your business to setting up a roadmap for continuous success on the digital front, Infince can reshape your digital ambitions in the most cost-effective way possible. Get in touch with us to know more about how your small business can conquer 2021 with Infince Digital Workplace.

Download White Paper: The Business Value of Infince for Business Owners and Employees

Choosing the Right Pricing Model for Enterprise IT Services

The recent trends in digital transformation have paved the way for ensuring optimal business growth for enterprises. With the rates of public cloud adoption going up, it seems that leaders have recognized the potential of modern IT tools and technologies for generating better revenue. Simultaneously, organizations have also started to find alternatives to traditional IT infrastructure models and achieve improved agility in their operations.

Today, the cloud has become ideal for businesses to build enterprise applications at much lesser costs quickly. Cloud also allows them to utilize advanced technologies to scale their operations and stay competitive in the market. As new IT solutions are entering the industry every day, organizations need to identify the right platform to manage their workloads.

Read more: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest? 

Choosing the right pricing model for enterprise IT services

Partnering with a reliable IT services vendor like Infince gives organizations the option to run workloads on-premises and on the public cloud. This works to bolster the security of sensitive company data further while ensuring superior operational efficiency. Although adopting the best IT models is always the goal of a business, leaders also look for responsive technology partners that can offer IT solutions at the best costs. So, it’s crucial to choose the right pricing model.

There are predominantly two types of pricing models for enterprise IT services – subscription-based models and consumption-based pricing. Choosing the right pricing strategy allows a business to scale their IT resources up or down as needed while saving some money in the process as well.

The consumption-based approach is usually the go-to option for companies that want to make their business operations more agile. On the other hand, a subscription-based model suits those who want to keep their budget under control while benefiting from the potential of modern IT tools and technologies. 

Read more: 5 Reasons For Small Businesses To Adopt SaaS Model 

Listed in this blog are three principal business areas that are primarily affected by your IT pricing model’s choice.

1. Enterprise IT Operations

In the past, launching a new IT project required considerable hardware and software investments. Sometimes, it also needed months of planning and execution to get it right. Today, businesses demand faster solutions that will allow them to launch an IT project on the go. It can be facilitated easily by collaborating with an agile IT services provider.

A subscription-based model means that you will need to pay upfront for receiving the services, be it cloud solution or on-premise. Some vendors also allow customizing the features in their subscription models so that you can decide which elements you will need to optimize the IT operations of your company. As the costs are determined based on the length of the subscription, long-term plans often mean lower business costs.

On the contrary, the consumption-based IT model allows you to pay for the services you use. While this can be a good option for those who have trouble keeping their IT systems updated with software updates and patches, it will need you to cherry-pick the required tools and technologies every time you want to launch an IT project. So it is vital to choose an end-to-end IT solutions provider when going with the consumption-based pricing model.

Read more: Infince – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business 

2. Running Workloads

Working with a reliable IT services vendor that will take care of everything from equipment maintenance and on-site configurations to training and support for your in-house team is always the best choice to stay ahead of competitors. That’s what Infince does for its customers. Infince’s technical concierge allows businesses to access IT support via phone, email, or live chat. The concierge helps you resolve the problem either by yourself or by arranging for a technician, depending on the challenge’s complexity.

When the IT vendor manages everything, a fixed recurring invoice can lead to better savings than paying every month. As subscription-based models are evolving, it gives you greater control and flexibility when choosing IT plans.

It also means determining your workload requirements adequately before choosing a pricing plan so that you can avoid all kinds of risks and keep a check on the costs. You can also use both public and hosted private clouds as per the plan to explore better opportunities to develop enterprise applications and services. Meanwhile, if you go with consumption IT plans, you can easily and quickly scale the IT resources on your terms and effectively run the workloads.

Moving between public clouds and on-premises setups can also be much cost-effective when it is consumption-based pricing. Enterprises can easily choose the business-critical applications necessary to improve performance or deal with any latency issues. Likewise, it can also be beneficial to pull back the workloads with highly sensitive business data that cannot be left off-premises.

Read more: How can modern IT management software empower companies to be more agile? 

3. Capacity Planning

IT capacity planning needs companies to evaluate their resource utilization, workforce needs, and application usage before buying the servers, storage, and network infrastructure from a vendor. In this case, using a subscription-based service works out because businesses can have a predictable expense to manage their revenue stream. Moreover, subscription models also save on the costs of full purchases to gain access to the IT tools required to cover their demands.

On the contrary, the consumption-based model, or the pay-as-you-go approach, allows organizations to make an immediate purchase for their unplanned IT decisions. This can help deal with sudden demand peaks that cannot be managed with the existing infrastructure. This also means that those who are not adept with capacity planning can benefit from consumption-based IT pricing strategies. A reliable vendor can also help you determine future capacity requirements and see if the resources are enough to meet those upcoming demands.

A subscription-based model can be a boon to businesses that need an all-in-one platform for their enterprise needs. For instance, Infince offers a vast pool of features to support the business’s changing needs for fixed pricing. Customers can also personalize the plans with added resources to match their current and planned needs, which will lead to better operational efficiency and productivity.

Read more: 5 Points To Consider While Choosing Your Enterprise Collaboration Software 

Selecting the right pricing model 

Choose consumption-based IT model, if you:

• Prefer maintaining a more agile business operations approach
• Need to shift too often from public cloud to on-site system
• Cannot determine future peak demands precisely
• Want scalable IT resources for unplanned potential workloads
• Do not have dedicated personnel or the resources to manage any software updates or IT maintenance work

Choose subscription-based IT model, if you:

• Need a greater level of control and flexibility over your IT plans
• Prefer to have a predictable monthly expense
• Have the capacity planning done right based on the predefined budget
• Do not want to look for the required tools and technologies every now and then for new IT projects
• Want a comprehensive solution for managing everything from IT systems configurations to training and support

Choosing an all-in-one business management solution can help you become flexible and responsive to meet the customer demands and ensure optimal growth for your business in today’s competitive environment. The final decision to go with usage-based models or subscription approach should be based on your business’s actual requirements.

Want to know more about the flexible pricing plans offered by Infince for businesses of all sizes and capacities? Contact us! 

Benefits of Implementing IT Assets and Inventory Management Software

During 2020-2024, the IT Management software is predicted to grow at a value of over USD 353 Million, with a 7% CAGR year over year. These estimates were from the pre-COVID era, which means that the growth rates could be accelerated now. In the new normal, workforce worldwide is undergoing a seamless transition from desk-based jobs in the office to work from anywhere culture. Fueled by the pandemic’s necessity, remote working from home became a mainstay for professionals in almost every country that bore the pandemic’s brunt. With this culture becoming mainstream, there is an essential requirement for two major components for succeeding:

1. Flexible Enterprise IT Policies

2. Flexible IT Asset Management Software

Flexible enterprise IT policies are needed to ensure that employees are readily connected to the organization’s technology ecosystem from their home networks without facing any issues.

Flexible IT asset management software is needed to accommodate and manage the entire spectrum of IT assets that are now distributed between employees’ offices and homes.

Read more: 4 Tips To Attain Success In The New Normal Remote Work Environment  

Once a strategic enterprise IT policy is in place, the next important thing a business needs for enabling a seamless remote working culture is efficient IT management software. Such a platform would allow easy control and management of an organization’s IT assets. Companies often rely on outdated IT inventory management software or manual spreadsheet-based mechanisms to organize their crucial assets. These will increase overhead and lead to utter chaos when the business faces disruptions on scales as massive as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benefits of having a Modern IT Inventory Management Software

With more companies expected to have a hybrid model of work in the future, employees may get the privilege to decide whether they want to work from the office or home. In such a mode of operation, having powerful IT management software can empower organizations to achieve agility in their operations. Let us examine the top 4 benefits that can be realized when an organization deploys a modern IT inventory management software:

Read more: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today  

1. Manage IT Hardware

An organization’s IT hardware includes components ranging from small network hardware to servers, data centers, and intelligent sensors that are used to aid work. It is vital to enable secure and seamless access to each of these assets when authorized employees need them. Also, there is a need to manage every hardware’s lifecycle from procurement to installation, deployment, maintenance, and retirement at correct intervals of time to maintain a sustainable IT environment for your staff.

2. Manage Devices

With digital being of paramount importance, every business will require employees to have some form of a computing device to be with them for official purposes. In most cases, it will be a desktop PC or laptop, or it could be smartphones with dedicated company apps for work management. Additionally, there will be a host of supporting devices such as printers, webcams, projection devices, etc. It is essential to keep a record of who has access to what to ensure that costly IT assets are not lost or misplaced.

3. Manage Software Licenses

Irrespective of the business sector that a company operates, there will be a range of software products that their employees would use to work better. It could be productivity apps, HR software, digital storage, enterprise work support apps, etc. The IT team will have a hard time administering licenses to employees who need access to different software at different times to progress in their work schedules. With robust IT Assets management software, they get the required dashboards to view, control, and administer licenses to cloud-based or on-premise software used within the workplace.

4. Manage Data

In the digital economy, data is the King, and this notion works in the operational side of businesses. When organizations deploy more software or platforms to empower their employees to work better and serve clients faster, these applications will generate a vast gamut of data daily. This data fuels in-depth analytics and yields insights on improving productivity, better allocation of IT and human resources, optimizing costs, etc. A modern IT management software can handle enterprise data as an IT asset and help companies build internal data workflows and processes to ensure that the data is put to fair use and ROI is derived faster.

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

A modern IT management software can help businesses realize untapped potential and value from their IT infrastructure. As we have broadly covered in this blog, enterprises of all sizes have an opportunity to make their entire business’s digital backend more flexible to support employees when they want to work from anywhere. This will significantly improve the organization’s preparedness for future disruptions similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. If your organization is on the lookout for a comprehensive enterprise management software to manage your digital landscape, get in touch with us to see why Infince can be the ideal solution.

How to Build an Effective and Solid Business Strategy for 2021!

For most businesses, 2020 has, undoubtedly, been a year they would want to write off from their history. As some things are meant to be forgotten, and things should move on, businesses must also look for the opportunities 2021 and upcoming years hold. Prospects will keep coming and going, but having a defined business strategy can help a company make the most of these opportunities.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

If you don’t have any business development strategies or are looking for suggestions, you can consider the following recommendations.

Ten ways to form an ideal business strategy

NOTE: Not always, but sometimes implementing specific strategies may require you to take advantage of certain productivity tools, centralized IT Management applications, private IT infrastructure, etc. For any such tools and applications, you can always count on Infince. Using this tool, you can get desired business management software to improve business processes, achieve cost efficiencies and experience the utmost data security. What makes Infince the first choice among businesses is its unbeatable pricing, including a 30-day free trial.

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like Infince 

A company can incorporate the following suggestions to enhance its growth and competency and improve its business level strategy.

1. Have a realistic vision

In a business world, having a vision may seem cliché, but it is, in fact, an essential thing which a business must be precise, clear, and realistic about. As vision is a peek into the future, it must comprise aspirations related to the organization you want to develop and ascertain what success implies in various business terms like markets, volumes, customers, etc.

2. Be unique to have an edge

One of the most critical business strategies is to choose the right tools and techniques that can help you identify how your company can deliver unique value to its customers. In most divisions of the economy, businesses are struggling in the crowd of similarity. When you have a well-planned business strategy, you can stay on top of the competition through its pricing model, delivery system, service offering, and more.

3. Be clear about your targets

Poor targeting is one of the major barriers to the growth of a business. Lack of clarity in targets makes a company suffer from imprecise messaging, which in turn misaligns sales and marketing. Therefore, make sure to be clear about your targets so that your business can focus better on resources and device an integrated sale and marketing approach, where marketing enables sales productivity. With clear targets, you can execute sales and marketing plans more effectively.

4. Focus on systematic growth

Only through systematic and streamlined growth can a company invest in talent, technology, and new tools. To achieve this growth, you need a business level strategy. A robust business development strategy allows your business to grow in the required dimensions.

Once your company is precise on this aspect, it will be easier to anticipate how much you can afford in terms of capital expenditure, overhead expenses, resource management, etc.

5. Decisions must be fact-based

Most executives complain about a lack of adequate data when planning or executing a business development strategy. Having access to fact-based data or information (through public records, social media trends, geographical location, etc.) allows a business to quickly quantify the value of various segments served, thus easing the decision making for multiple operations.

6. Have a balanced short & long term planning

While some companies may prefer to have short term planning to achieve their objective, others may choose long term planning as a better way to achieve it. Instead of choosing one or the other, it is advisable to have a balanced mix of short-term and long-term planning. Having such a balance allows companies to keep the team and the strategies aligned with the objectives through long term planning.

7. Agility is Necessity

Companies should always be focused on long term scenarios; however, they should be responsive as well. For example, one of the critical components in forming a business strategy should be anticipating market trends. Companies should evaluate long-term market trends and follow procedures based on this information by holding strategy review meetings at regular intervals.

8. Bring transparency

As companies are looking to hire more millennial employees in their team, it has led to agility and enhanced transparency in operations. Such transparency in the various departments and operations has brought employees together, easing the endeavors to meet the company’s objectives significantly.

9. Invest time in pre-planning

You would want your managers to welcome the business development strategies that you frame without any hesitations. It would be better to do proper research and gather important information ahead of your strategic planning. When you have a well-thought plan beforehand, it can help you gain greater control over your choices, resulting in a positive outcome.

10. Make your strategies flexible

Every strategy you form for your business should be amendable. This characteristic comes useful when you wish to make changes to them due to unexpected changes in the business trend, customer’s preferences, or results being different from what you expected. Ensure that you always have a Plan B for the things that don’t go accordingly with your Plan A. This way, you might achieve an increased success rate in implementing your strategies and successfully meeting the organization’s objectives. 

To sum up!

To conclude, a company should incorporate a business strategy to bring together all their employees working towards the set target while keeping things transparent at all levels. A company must ensure that its business strategies are swift, well-planned, and fact-based, supported by a backup plan if things don’t go as expected.

Read more: 5 Features of Infince that will Transform The Way You Work 

If, at any level, your business development strategy requires the help of IT management, private IT infrastructure, cloud migration and data management, custom dashboards, and collaboration or productivity tools, reach out to Infince. Here, industry-trained professionals devise the best business strategy for your organization.