Why your small business needs to invest in a CRM solution

Many small business owners have concerns about how they need to prioritize their technology investments. Since a good majority of companies start with limited budgets, the portion kept aside for IT infrastructure (both hardware and software) will be under great scrutiny. However, there are some technology platforms you simply cannot ignore in your small business because they are crucial in enabling long term growth and success. One such platform is Customer Relationship Management or CRM. The global market for CRM software is expected to reach $81.9 Billion by 2025 and this is proof of how important businesses see this as a path to success.

Related Reading: 6 Benefits of Using a Cloud CRM 

In the initial days, it might be easier for you to keep a spreadsheet or document having details of customers and leads and follow-up with them occasionally for new business. But as time grows, your business will expand and so will the list. Missing out on tapping and monetizing the huge potential of your accumulated customer and lead data will turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes you will make as a small entrepreneur. A CRM platform can solve all these problems in one go. If you are wondering how here are 5 reasons why every growing small business or startup must on-board an efficient CRM solution:

1. Managing contact and relationships

Over the years, your sales guys or business development folks may change. But the customers or leads with whom they have interacted will still be a potential business opportunity for you to explore further. If there is a place where their data can be stored and organized for easy discovery in the future by your salespeople, then your business can continue to build and nurture relationships with customers even if people handling the operation change over time. It also allows sales personnel to track the progress of each customer relation like the context of the last conversation that was reported for the customer, their preferences and behavior as observed by the previous or sub-ordinate salesperson and many such insights.

2. Forecasting business opportunities

A good amount of success in your business depends on how effectively you can predict revenue for the coming months or an entire year. For this,  there is a need for clear visibility into the sales pipeline as well as insights about customers that frontline staff can use to nurture and close deals at the earliest. A CRM platform is a perfect choice for this situation as it helps managements identify business opportunities, forecast revenues based on relationship status with prospective leads.

3. Engaging responses

Today there are multiple channels through which customers or potential customers interact with a business like social media, in-store visits or through any digital and physical channel. Sales personnel need to have accurate information about the services or products that are up for grabs and need to know the preferences and interests of the customers they are handling. By tailoring responses suitable for each customer with a tinge of personalization, they will be able to engage them better and ultimately have greater chances of a sale. 

A CRM solution can bring about this level of engagement by acting as a medium to dispense information for use by the sales personnel. The information will include details of what to sell, how to sell and whom to sell. A CRM can bring about social conversations with customers to improve brand loyalty and bring in long term business prospects by allowing folks to respond to queries and sentiments posted on social media channels as well.

4. Improving team productivity

CRM software can create a virtual platform for different employees in customer-facing and support roles to collaborate efficiently for better customer service. It helps divide tasks between colleagues or departments such as marketing and sales, assign the responsibility of customer engagements with respective regional or area representatives, provide relevant support and progress measurement for leadership and so on. A huge amount of sub-tasks within these collaborative scenarios can be automated through the digital capabilities of a CRM solution. With automation, teams can focus their energy and effort on core sales and customer service activities thereby improving productivity levels considerably.

5. Empowering intuitive growth of sales process

Your sales strategies need to accommodate market trends over time as consumer demands are very dynamic. With a powerful CRM solution at the heart of your sales and marketing activities, you have an engine that can constantly supply rich information on how your customers and potential customers react to market trends. This allows your sales team to modify rules, policies, and strategies accordingly and garner support from other divisions such as marketing. In short, your sales team can sell what the market demands at any time.

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

A CRM solution is an inevitable component of the growth strategy of a small business today. Having an effective digital enterprise platform that offers you a data-driven business infrastructure accommodating even CRM capability is the need of the hour. This is where Infince can be the solution. Get in touch with us to know more.

Small Business Success In 2020: Overcoming Challenges

Small businesses and startups have today become a major driver of change across geographies irrespective of the business domain. This paradigm shift has been brought about by a number of factors with technology being the number one among them. With powerful digital tools and channels, small businesses were able to disruptively grab market share from established business houses with lower costs and fewer resources. 

2020 looks to be yet another exciting year for such businesses. But before they reap the benefits, we feel that there are still some challenges small businesses need to overcome to remain competent and successful in 2020. Here are 6 of them explained:

1. Employee Engagement

Your employees are your biggest strength. If they are happy and committed to your customers, then business growth is guaranteed to happen irrespective of the strategy you follow. However, building an engaged workforce is no easy task. Companies must try out innovative and intuitive ways to engage each and every employee in the workforce like creating channels for them to transparently share feedback and opinion, considering their inputs while taking crucial decisions and so on. 

Employees should feel that their voice is recognized and that leadership is approachable. Higher engagement levels are directly related to better productivity and profitability of teams.

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

2. Planning and Project Management

A business performs at its optimum when every department is organized and works together to achieve a common objective. This happens when proper planning and seamless project management are in place. 

Irrespective of the size of your workforce, project and task planning needs strict emphasis. Insights from such initiatives will be helpful in deciding the future course of action across multiple departments like recruitment, infrastructure, marketing, and sales. There is a need to bring in effortless project management tools to make it easier for companies to plan and schedule their work and meet customer expectations every time.

3. Cyber Security

It is estimated that in every 39 seconds, a cyber-attack or hack occurs globally. As more small businesses embrace the digital bandwagon, the amount of channels where sensitive data is stored or processed has increased monumentally. This means that there are more avenues for cyber threats to occur and every business big or small must address this issue seriously. 

Any breach of sensitive data can lead to damages worth millions as regulatory bodies and authorities across the globe have tightened their grip on user data security. Small businesses must, in particular, be aware of threats lurking in their digital channels and take appropriate measures to avoid any mishaps.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

4. Intuitive Marketing

It doesn’t matter much if you have a great product with mouthwatering features. It must be discoverable for potential customers and this is where marketing becomes a key challenge. Today there are tons of channels where small businesses and startups can showcase their offerings to win business deals. The trick is applying intelligence to identify the correct audience, the best-fit approach, the right content and the most cost-effective propagation technique to reach them. 

From email marketing to social media advertising, there are several areas to explore for today’s businesses. Also using smart marketing automation platforms to understand sentiments of customers is also a very fruitful initiative for identifying the best marketing strategy.

5. Customer Experience

You are required to provide a great experience across any channel that customers interact with. They need faster responses to every query or concern they have and delays are usually punished with negative sentiments on social media. Additionally, there is a need to be aware of trends and interests that can be used to offer personalized experiences to customers. To bring all this in one place, small businesses need to have a Customer Relationship Management or CRM solution that is capable of encapsulating all customer relations in one spot and deliver insights to serve them better every time they reach out to you. A satisfied customer is your biggest marketing tool as their positive sentiments about your brand will bring in more customers through referrals.

6. Talent Management

In addition to employee engagement, there needs to be a powerful and seamless collaboration platform within your organization for managing talent. Right from onboarding to payroll and attendance management to complex records and file management, there is a need for seamless digital transformation within the workplace.

Employees demand flexibility in their work with options such as remote work options, shared collaboration spaces with secure file exchange. If you need to create a workplace for the future, it is important to equip your employees with the digital tools that make their work easier.

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

2020 looks to be an exciting year for small businesses that identify their core strengths and invest in mitigating their core challenges. As customers evolve with dynamic needs, small businesses and startups must bring on-board state of the art digital platforms that can help deliver meaningful experiences to end customers. This is where platforms like Infince can be a game-changer. From being the digital backbone of your small business and handling every critical aspect from employee collaboration to customer relationship management, Infince can be your success mantra for 2020. Get in touch with us to know more.

How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

When you set up a new business or startup, one of the first things you need to do is to invest in a custom email and website domain for your small business. Once you have brought the rights, bring in an email service provider to create an email channel for you and your team. 

Many startups make the mistake of going in for free email services in the beginning to cut costs, but it is not at all a recommended move. They fail to understand that today’s customers are highly conscious of sharing information or doing business with anonymous startups that do not have a website or unique email address for communication. Now that the need to use a powerful email service is justified, it is time to look at the criterion to select the best provider for your small business.

Evaluate these factors before choosing an ideal email service provider:

Related Reading: Why Your Startup Needs A Professional Email Account

1. Identify your Needs and Potential

Before going through the features of an email service provider, startups and small businesses must first look within their organization to identify their needs. Find the number of email accounts needed, the potential scale or rate of growth in emails expected over the next couple of years and the budgetary scope available for investing in IT platforms like email. Also, make a list of devices and other software tools you are likely to use in the coming years that need integration with your business email.

2. Evaluate the Compatibility of Platforms with Demand

Once you have your unique requirements listed down, it will be easy to cross-check on feature offerings from multiple email service providers. See whether the service provider can cater to your needs of scale, device friendliness, platform integration, and other technical requirements. Check for hidden clauses or limitations from service providers that prevent you from exercising full flexibility in your particular email operations such as subdomain requirements for different departments like sales, marketing or support.

3. Examine Cost options

For small businesses and startups, it is important to allocate budget for core business activities and hence very often the IT department has to work with limited financial resources. While selecting an email provider, it is important to evaluate their pricing options to see if they offer a perfect combination of features and cost-effectiveness. Modern-day cloud-based services offer subscription plans that bill you based on usage. This is the best option that lets you scale on demand while paying only for what you consume be it the number of user accounts, email storage size, features, etc. A service provider that offers seamless flexibility with prices for their subscription-based email services will be the most ideal candidate for your startup or small business.

4. Availability and Support

While choosing a service provider for your business email, it is important to pick one that has a well-defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) on service availability. For most startups, emails are the primary sales and marketing arsenal and often require round-the-clock availability and flexibility. As such, ensuring uninterrupted services for enabling such critical functions is an imminent feature that needs to be offered by the email service provider. While it is impossible to have a zero fault service, the response time they agree in the SLA is vital in making a choice. The faster the service provider can get your email back on track from a disruption, smoother and seamless will be your operations.

5. Security and Backup

At some point in time, businesses need to exchange sensitive data with their customers or employees through email. The information may include data pertaining to sensitive company credentials such as business models or financial statements. Hence, it is important to know how secure your email data is with the service provider you choose. Any scope for data leaks or unauthorized access should be eliminated at all costs. From a security perspective, ensure that the email provider offers a well-structured and redundant backup policy. The provider must offer fault free service operations in the event of a major issue.

Related Reading: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

It is important for startup businesses to entrust their core communication channels like email to a service provider that can help facilitate seamless availability, affordability, and flexibility of features. This is why cloud-based enterprise platforms like INFINCE are finding greater acceptance among small businesses and startups. With interactive enterprise management features and powerful email and other communication platforms integrated into them, INFINCE can be the game changer in your digital journey. Get in touch with us to explore more about how INFINCE can be your startup’s best companion.

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

For any small business, the best way to ensure a culture of continuous success in their services and offerings is to seamlessly facilitate teams to work together on projects. Hence, the need for a simple yet powerful project management tool is a matter of high importance. 

Every member of a team needs to be able to track and manage activities in their individual and group level-dependent tasks. From a simple tracker of daily meetings or scrum updates to enabling faster completion of dependent tasks, there are quite a few capabilities that small businesses must look out for while selecting a project management tool for their operations. Let’s have a close look at the top 5 features that every small business need in their project management tool today:

1. Resource Management

Without a doubt, any project management tool will be the key source for managing resources assigned to a project irrespective of the size or duration of the project. It gives a clear picture for decision-makers to lead efforts for new deals from customers based on the availability of resources free to take up the load. 

Such a tool gives management the visibility of their resource utilization from past or current in-progress projects as well as their availability for future work orders. This intelligence about resource utilization and availability will be useful in setting the tone for a number of activities within the organization such as marketing, recruitment, budgeting, infrastructure and maintenance planning and much more.

Related Reading: 5 Ways To Run A Successful Business With Remote Employees

2. Manage Scope Changes

Every project that your team sets out to work will have an initial scope of work defined according to customer expectations. But in most cases, customer expectations change in short time spans. This leads to situations where a project or individual task scopes require a change in definition midway into their original implementation. With an effective project management tool, it becomes easier for managers to identify points of impact with the scope change and delegate responsibility for change management to every individual or group that may be impacted by the change. 

Another important point to note here is that the intelligent insights you have into your team’s availability and task progress can be used to resist overwhelmingly large scope changes that have deviated considerably from initial customer requirements. It will be easier to give a data-backed response citing budgetary constraints, delivery timelines and resource availability for unaffordable scope changes.

3. Issue Management

In every project, it is the duty of the managers to identify obstacles and issues that prevent the project or sub-tasks from progressing. This becomes easier with a powerful project management tool. 

When various stakeholders of the project report an issue, it is easier for managers to identify dependent task owners or groups who can step up to resolve the issue in the fastest and best way possible. A faster resolution will enable faster time to market for customer deliverables and effective issue resolution will ensure that the delivered product or offering will meet or exceed customer expectations and avoid returns.

Related Reading: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

4. Schedule Management

As far as small businesses are concerned, they face the challenge of having to deliver on customer commitments in the fastest schedule possible. This is vital in their growth journey especially if it is the case of a budding startup. Having to rely on manual documentation and spreadsheets to keep track of subtasks and activities is not a welcoming endeavor. Having to follow up with concerned personnel for updates will result in a lot of time and effort overhead which can slow down delivery timelines. This is where a project management tool can step up the game. 

With effortless schedule management, easy and transparent team visibility into task progress, it becomes easier for managers to keep projects on schedule. It also offers insights for planning backup or replacement of resources in emergency situations without impacting delivery timelines.

5. File Management

Irrespective of the domain, any project will involve tons of documents and other files that need to be available for immediate access by all stakeholders. It may be related to project development, schedules, customer deliverables and so on. Without secure file storage and exchange channel, different personnel having access to the project will find it difficult to obtain relevant information on a need basis. 

A project management tool will enable easier and safer access to files such as documents with features such as permission control thereby eliminating unauthorized access. This is a key feature to look out for in a project management tool for small businesses with the security aspect taking center stage to protect sensitive customer data as well.

With the rise of digital, organizations are re-thinking the way they monitor and manage complex customer engagements and projects. For small businesses, the need for effective project management is essential to keep a sustained growth in their business. With Infince you can build smarter business practices that enable collaboration among departments and organizations, and engage your customers and workforce better. With seamless project management capabilities, it can help drive success faster for your customer projects. Get in touch with us to see how Infince can support your project management efforts.

How A CRM Helps Drive More Sales For Your Small Business?

“Customer is King” holds true for any business, in spite of what you offer to the market for revenue; be it products or services. But with the immense growth of technology and its salient propagation among businesses, there has been a huge reduction in the gap that existed between large and small businesses when it comes to satisfying customer expectations. 

Through innovation and digital transformation, small businesses have been able to penetrate markets that were controlled by heavyweights by disrupting the entire product or service lifecycles. A major factor in enabling this disruption was customer data and this is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software makes the difference in building a great experience for customers. From managing sensitive information about customers to help sales folks close deals faster, CRM is a vital tool for today’s growing small businesses. 

Related Reading:6 Benefits of Using a Cloud CRM

Here are 5 convincing reasons why small businesses need to invest in a CRM solution today:

1. Identify your Most Suitable Customer

Did you know that 79% of all marketing-generated leads never convert into a sale without a CRM behind the entire operation? This happens when you do not identify and nurture the right prospect. In the absence of a CRM, your sales team will not have access to insights garnered by your marketing team about potential areas of interest of the prospect. This will result in the sales team preparing the best pitch for a wrong target and the entire effort goes down in vain without any result. With a CRM in place, the sales team can get accurate insights about customers who are the best suitable for each sales pitch they have created from the business offerings available.

2. Plan on Building Customer Relationships

It is natural for your sales force to run out of ideas or time while meeting, convincing, and converting prospective leads into rewarding deals. With a CRM application, they can build a relationship with the customer meticulously so that every discussion they have is productive and conversion happens faster. By documenting every interaction in a CRM, the salesperson can use insights from the CRM to approach prospects at the right time with the right context and with the right offering to quickly close the discussion. 

Insights derived from previous customer interactions can be utilized by all members of the sales team as best practices to follow when they meet a new prospect or when taking over the next stage of discussions with a customer who was brought into the nurturing phase by another salesperson.

3. Drive Better Campaigns

Today’s massively popular digital marketing landscape is one way small businesses can catapult their sales considerably. With a CRM platform, it becomes easier to build a data-driven marketing engine around the platform and make better and smarter campaigns to win customer interest. 

A simple example would be using insights from the CRM in an email campaign to boost holiday sales for a small online retail business. The system would give insights such as preferred email reading time, interest and buying patterns of prospects (derived from their past interactions and shopping history also stored in the CRM) and choices in product varieties. These insights can help in closing the sales deal faster with more convincing sales messages and the right timing of email. It may also include targeted promotions such as discounts on special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries.  The small analytical input from the CRM can make a big difference in winning the sales conversion.

4. Improve Up-selling and Cross-selling Capabilities

Once a customer’s journey has been recorded in the CRM, it becomes easy for a small business to use the data to run targeted up-selling and cross-selling promotions. This will also help you to build sustainable long term relationships with valued customers by engaging with them periodically. A committed customer is your biggest marketing asset and by creating a culture of continuous sales engagement with intelligent CRM inputs, this commitment is easily achieved.

5. Better Employee Productivity

With the help of CRM, your sales and marketing teams can make better and smarter decisions with regard to their daily operational schedules. CRM brings in a great deal of automation and frees up time and effort which your employees can utilize for creating better experiences for customers. By empowering them with real-time and intelligent insights about customer behavior, it enables them to achieve their goals and targets seamlessly. It reduced paperwork and research time involved in every customer interaction, thereby paving the way for a smoother customer relationship management experience in every interaction.

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

A CRM is a small business’s best buddy for its marketing and customer outreach initiatives. From building a healthy sales pipeline to helping build fabulous experiences through customer feedback about your products and services, it is a one-stop destination to bring more sales revenue for your business. Successful businesses utilize the CRM capabilities of platforms like INFINCE to drive more value from their customer relationships. Get in touch with us to know how INFINCE’s CRM capabilities can be the right choice for your customer relationship management.

Why Your Startup Org Needs A Professional Email Account

The disruptive gains made by several first-time entrepreneurs in the areas that were once dominated by the big fishes in the industry have given way to the age of startups. However, with the rise in popularity, it is likely that every idea you have for a startup will be probably thought of by another person or team as well. Therefore, today you have multiple startups working in the same domain with tight competition. Here is where every element that makes your startup unique from the rest can be a game-changer or decider of success. 

While innovations in business models, monetary backup and investment, pricing schemes are all key elements in making your startup stand out in the long run, there are a few marketing elements that could make an impact immediately. Your business email is a prime example of such a marketing entity that can re-define your first impressions in the market.

Once you have decided upon a name and launched a website in your name domain, the next important thing to do is to set up a professional business email account with your domain name. Many startup founders make the mistake of using a free email service in the beginning and reach out to customers or investors for deals. You need to be professional from day one to create a better experience for every stakeholder you reach out to, including your customers, investors or other prospective talents who you wish to hire for your team. 

Here are 4 reasons why you should have a professional business email account for your startup from day one:

1. Personalized Experience

It is expected that by 2023, the average number of emails that will be sent daily will be around 347 billion worldwide. Your startup’s marketing email or customized investor pitch will be one among them and should you choose a regular free email service like Gmail or Outlook without your domain in the email address, then chances are that you will likely fall out of the 17.92% of emails that are opened every day. 

A personalized email from a business email account is more likely to be opened by a prospect as they would expect it to have something valuable to offer. The content in your email is a topic for another discussion that we are keeping for some time else. The domain name itself can create a sense of personalized branding experience which will improve your acceptance rates in the market significantly.

2. Improves Credibility

Did you know that amongst the millennial generation, nearly 68% have agreed that promotional emails have influenced their purchasing decisions on various occasions? This is a wake-up call for startups to start promoting their business through email campaigns. But then comes the question of credibility. 

How can you ensure that prospective customers will open and respond to your promotional email? 

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

Having an email account with your business name’s domain at the end surely helps in this regard. People have a natural tendency to ignore promotional emails from generic free email services like Gmail. This happens even if you have a great subject line to catch attention or even better promotional content in the body. The impression that the brand has its own website and business email account is vital for establishing the right contact in the first instance.

3. Provides Flexibility for Future Expansion

In due course of time, your startup is expected to grow into a sizeable business with a possibility of numerous subdivisions. If you have a professional business email account rather than a free one, then it is very easy to set up sub-groups within the main email account in your domain. It will ensure that every sub-function or department in your business has a unique identifying email subdomain for better internal mail management and communication. Additionally, this allows external stakeholders like customers, partners, and vendors to reach out to the right department when they need support. 

For example, customer service requests may be directed to an email account like “[email protected]” for faster responses. Investors may reach out to “[email protected]” for their dedicated information hotline and much more. Today there are cloud-based service providers that offer unlimited expansion in subdomain email accounts under your main domain on a subscription basis. These ensure that your overall costs stay under control and you only pay for what you use be it storage or number of users.

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

4. Higher Security

We are not saying that generic free email clients available today are insecure but as far as a business is concerned, their email systems often handle sensitive and confidential customer and business information. So, an extra layer of security is always needed to safeguard the system from cyber threats. Dedicated business email clients offer this added layer of security for your business email and ensure that file exchange, data and user management is seamlessly secured by encryption and other security standards. Effective rights management controls to ensure that no unauthorized communication happens from your business email account and prevents leakage of sensitive data through emails.

5. How Infince Can Help

A professional business email is a startup organization’s first asset to begin scouring for resources, be it customer deals, investor communications for funding and vendor communications. To get the first impressions right, it is absolutely vital to have a secure and powerful business email platform incorporated in your own domain. Successful businesses rely on platforms like Infince to set up their entire digital ecosystem from websites to business emails and intra-organizational information management. Our suite of applications running in the cloud allows you to build the most secure and flexible digital framework for your startup. From setting up a professional email account for your small business to manage user rights, Infince has a host of features designed exclusively for startups and small businesses to start their digital journey. Get in touch with us to know more.

5 Ways To Run A Successful Business With Remote Employees

Gone are the days when a key measure for success in business was the number of hours their employees spent within the four walls of the office. Today, what matters is how well the job gets done irrespective of whether the employee works 8 hours or so inside the office or from anywhere in the world at his or her convenience. 

Flexible and remote working options have become one of the most sought benefits among today’s workforce and at times, people prefer this over higher salary as well. 

In fact, studies have shown that nearly 90% of all employees would love to work remotely at some point in their career either as full time or even part-time when situations demand so. It is the duty of employers to ensure that such flexibility and remote work options are made available for their resources. This will help retain talent and reduce turnaround costs significantly for every position. 

But now comes the question of how to achieve this? Well, here are 5 tips to run your business efficiently with a remote workforce.

1. Grow a Culture of Collaboration

Before going ahead with investing in the tools and infrastructure needed to facilitate remote working for your employees, there is a basic cultural shift needed in your organization. Age-old customs such as micromanaging every single activity of an employee will be a huge roadblock in offering flexible and remote working options. Even though the company may promote it, managers would find ways to forcibly bring employees to the office somehow. 

The first thing to do here is to create a holistic awareness for all employees irrespective of their job roles and seniority. Explain to them the benefits of having a healthy work-life balance, improvements in productivity while working remotely and how to incorporate best practices in remote work. Make remote working a normal routine in your work culture and not a special privilege. This will help improve sentiments of employees and avoid biased favors and other negative impressions that may arise in your core employee vision.

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

2. Empower the Workforce with Technology

One of the biggest issues that companies face while offering remote work options is access and connectivity for remote employees to the core office environment. This is where technology can be a lifesaver. From offering secure connectivity to internal office networks and file storage archives to empowering teamwork in real-time using virtual workspaces, the options are limitless. 

There are powerful cloud-based platforms that facilitate real-time communication and collaboration on work tasks. Employees can access and work together in these virtual workspaces from anywhere in the world and securely exchange confidential files and information. They can stay connected with the events happening in the office through intranets that have social media-inspired interfaces for engaging interactions. Such platforms enable transparent sharing of workloads and ensure that everyone is aware of how their work can impact the service delivery of the whole team.

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

3. Encourage Autonomous Decision Making

Today, businesses must seek to inculcate leadership quality in employees and for this to happen, the first thing to do is allow employees to work autonomously with minimal supervision. 

Using technology solutions, it is possible to easily measure the value they are contributing autonomously and how well their defined job responsibilities are managed. Hence, there is minimal need for manual supervision and employees can be trained to make decisions on critical scenarios that have a direct impact on customer experience. This is yet another step to encourage a responsible remote work culture. 

When remote working employees have a clear understanding of how their decisions and pace of work can impact overall business objectives, they leave very little room for errors and mistakes. This will greatly improve team dynamics and also set the tone for a highly productive remote work culture.

4. Dedicated Communication

Communication is a key pillar in empowering the workforce of any kind within an organization. When you want to have a successful business with remote working employees, then communication becomes even more important. All employees working from anywhere in the world need to have constant sync with their peers in the office and have an idea of what is happening in the organization or within their teams. 

In addition to standard email communication, companies must on-board a wide variety of engaging conversational channels for employees to stay connected with the organization. It could be periodic newsletters having company-wide information, instant messengers for people to converse with each other or in groups as part of team projects or it could even be a fully-fledged intranet. Irrespective of the channel you choose to implement, the core purpose of communication here is to make employees aware of what happens in the organization, what is to be expected as return from their job roles and how their performance drives value for end customers.

5. Measure Results and Provide Feedback

Offering flexible remote working policies is one side of making a successful workforce environment. You need to ensure that such policies and flexibility do not come at the cost of missed business output. Here is where ample measurement of performance and productivity needs to be maintained. Through modern project management tools, it is easy for managers to assign responsibilities and tasks to remote employees and monitor the progress through periodic sessions. These sessions may be a video or audio conferencing and don’t require the person to be physically present in the office. These sessions can also be used to identify roadblocks and challenges that remote employees face and provide them with support and advisory needed to tackle them easily.

As more and more companies shift their work culture to a flexible and fully remote operational model, you need to be looking at ways to replicate it to remain competitive. This is where platforms like INFINCE can be the game-changer in facilitating the best environment for remote teams. From collaboration tools to powerful project management and cloud storage, our range of solutions empowers your workforce to drive more value every day from the comfort of their homes. Get in touch with us to know more.

5 Must-have Productivity Tools For Your Workforce

We live in an age where time is money. For entrepreneurs, this is even more critical. The faster they can meet their customer demands, the greater will be the benefits for their business. But what makes service delivery faster and without any deficiency in quality?  The answer lies in building and nurturing a productive workforce. The more productive your workforce is, the better the quality of service they render. To perform well in less time, it takes more than just the technical and soft skills of an employee. They have to manage their workloads, plan strategically for every assigned task and stay on top of priority assignments without distractions. This is where productivity tools can be a game-changer for today’s highly demanding work culture in businesses that are big or small. 

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

If you were wondering about which ones to invest in for your workforce, here is a roundup of the top 5 productivity tools that successful organizations ensure their workforce has access to:

1. Smart Email Management Tools

By 2022, it is expected that an average of 347 billion emails will be sent online daily. Emails are still considered to be the number one communication channel in official environments for peers to communicate with each other and in groups. On a daily basis, an employee spends a significant amount of time opening and or responding to emails. However, only a very small portion of the emails that an employee gets in a day may be ones that require urgent attention or action from their side. 

A smart email management tool will empower employees to filter out important emails more effectively and prioritize responses depending on the severity of the content in each email. Using intelligent filters, mails can be grouped and separated into folders wherein higher priority mails can be easily identified and responded to at the earliest while others can wait in a priority queue for later responses.

2. Calendar Management

One of the first things that employees do when they step into work every day is to check their calendars for any important meetings or events that are scheduled for the day or soon. As far as productivity goes in this regard, smart solutions that notify users about calendar events that they should pay attention to in the immediate future, are a must-have. Additionally, it should be easy for them to organize meetings on the go with peers who may be in the same office or at a different city or from anywhere in the world if you have remote working policies in the workplace. 

The calendar management application should be able to manage time zone variations and block time accordingly for participants, check dependencies with other schedules and manage several other factors to ensure that every stakeholder is readily available for important sessions. Besides, these solutions should enable employees to access their schedules from any device they are using be it mobiles or PC or Laptops when they are in the office or shuttling between work and home.

3. Task Management

One of the most essential tools for any workforce to be productive is a task management tool. From noting down things as a ‘To do’ list to assigning responsibilities and roles to individuals collaborating on a project, task management tools perform a wide variety of activities in an office environment. It helps employees to stay on track with their committed deadlines and work simultaneously on multiple tasks without losing a grip on individual tasks and their priorities. It also allows managers to move people between projects or tasks for better utilization and improved productivity. 

Having a highly flexible task management platform enables organizations to bring out the best results from teamwork and reward performers for their extra efforts when necessary.

4. Collaboration Channels

In fast-paced business environments, there is a need for people from different streams or with different skills to come together and create solutions for challenging customer scenarios. This requires powerful collaboration channels that offer a host of features such as innovative meeting schedulers, video or audio conferencing and call solutions, remote file, and media exchange facilities, access-controlled storage, and virtual workspaces. 

By bringing on-board such solutions, enterprises can empower their workforce to unleash their ideas and work together as a team to arrive at the best fit solution for a problem. This happens irrespective of geographical or time zone constraints and allows people to manage their workloads, handle dependencies and ensure strict compliance to standards in client service delivery.

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

5. Engaging Intranet Platforms

A workplace environment today has a large population of millennials who prefer a highly engaged work culture if they are to think about a long career with you. For this, there is a need to bring in a social infrastructure where everyone in your organization can connect with each other, get to know about events and happenings in the workplace, organize team-building or interactive sessions and collaborate effectively in your work environment. This is precisely what modern-day intranet solutions offer for enterprises.

You need to bring in a social media-inspired platform for Intra organizational interactions. An intranet facilitates the building of a community within your workforce where people converse and gain knowledge about all things related to work or outside.

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

By establishing better social conversations around a wide range of topics, intranets allow employees to find peers with similar interests, create subgroups or forums for topic-related discussions, have one on one conversations via instant messaging and improve overall communication. The possibilities that will be unlocked are humongous.

Creating a productive workforce today depends highly on providing the right set of digital tools for staff to manage their work efficiently. Here is where enterprise platforms like InfinCE can be a real game-changer. It brings together a host of features like Calendar and Task Management, Intranet and File Exchange channels, Collaborative Document and file management, etc. all under one roof. Get in touch with us to know more about Infince.

Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is today considered to be the responsibility of an organization as a whole. Earlier, it was merely seen as a focus area of the HR department and several small companies did not have a clear vision about employee engagement and how it can impact their growth. All they did was organize a few monthly fun activities in the office and expected employees to be motivated on their own to return to work every day from their homes. But times have changed and studies have shown that teams with greater engagement levels show profitability levels 21% higher than the rest. 

Your small business, irrespective of the domain in which you operate, should include workforce engagement as one of the key pillars of growth. Only when your employees show dedication and passion to contribute to building valuable experiences for your customers, will your business achieve desired levels of growth. If you are still wondering how, here are 5 ways in which employee engagement can instill more growth for your small business enterprise:

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

1. Better Research

As a start-up or small business, every aspect of your operation is critical. People handling each department needs to be aware of the fundamental rules in building great customer experiences through their individual focus areas. 

In a small business, there may not be many avenues where employees can be offered training sessions on improving and incorporating best practices in their individual roles. They need to take up research and learning exercises to improve their competence on their own. To do so, they need motivation and this is exactly what employee engagement initiatives can bring to the table. When employees are engaged, they will feel energized to try out new innovations in their field of operation. They will research it, find out best practices and seamlessly drive value from implementing the practice in their daily routine.

2. Ownership and Responsibility

Startups and smaller businesses often face the challenge of meeting bigger expectations with fewer resources. As such, the workforce in such scenarios will have to be autonomous to a great extent. They need to make decisions on assigned tasks with authority and in most cases without supervisory monitoring. For this to happen, employees need to be empowered enough to take ownership of the tasks assigned to them. 

Each component of your business should be run by the respective employee as if it were their own business unit. Such a high level of commitment and sense of ownership comes only if people are recognized and engaged at work. When they have seamless work experience along with the right enablers to help finish their jobs faster and with more efficiency, employees will demonstrate ownership of their activities at a bigger scale. This will positively influence the way customer service is delivered through your business channels leading to better revenue potential in the long run.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

3. Talent Retention

Studies show that in the United States alone, the cost of losing an employee is above 15,000 dollars. This is the turnover cost incurred for replacing them with a similarly skilled worker. As a small business owner, hiring and retaining the right talent is often a tricky perspective considering the fact that the options available for a potential candidate are numerous. If you have found a good talent, then it is best to retain them and use their skills to nurture your business. Here is where employee engagement can add to the retention experience. 

By enabling a comfortable working environment with autonomous decision-making freedom, you can empower workers to explore their talents in all possible ways. Benefits such as healthy work-life balance, recognition of work done and seamless career progression options can improve engagement levels of employees. This will, in turn, make them stay with you for a longer period thereby saving you from bearing a huge talent replacement cost in the long run.

4. Boost Profitability through Increase in Productivity

When employees are engaged, they perform better and with more efficiency leading to higher results and productivity levels in the organization. Global consulting firm Wyatt Watson reports that companies that paid attention to employee engagement initiatives were able to generate 26% higher revenue per employee. 

This increase in productivity will reflect in your business growth as well. When more value can be contributed by each employee, the overall profitability of the business scales up. This is a win-win situation for everyone.

5. Improved Collaboration

In every workspace, irrespective of the team size, one of the biggest drivers of growth is team bonding. “Unity is Strength” is a motto that every business must incorporate in its work culture. By bringing on-board powerful employee engagement platforms that enable seamless collaboration between your employees, small business players can drive better results through teamwork. Modern technology solutions like Infince enable team members working from anywhere in the world to organize meetings, share files, work on a project together over virtual workspaces thereby enabling faster fulfillment of customer service. 

When everyone in the team is engaged, they will be willing to help each other with individual tasks and go the extra mile to support colleagues who may be facing challenges. This generous effort of teamwork will reflect positively in the brand value your small business propagates to the outside world.

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

Workplace engagement is a key driver of growth in today’s highly competitive market for small businesses. Entrepreneurs need to have a dedicated vision to improve engagement levels within the company and enable a better working environment for each employee. Here is where cloud-based platforms like Infince can be the game-changer for your organization.

From creating powerful intranets that enable enterprise-wide communication and collaboration to file sharing, Infince can help drive an engaging culture in your organization. Get in touch with us to explore how to keep your employees happy, engaged and motivated to come back to work every day.

5 Ways Small Businesses Can Promote Collaboration Among Teams

For every small business today, the key to success lies in empowering their workforce to work together in the best possible way to deliver value to customers. This is true irrespective of the industry that your business focuses. Studies show that nearly 39% of employees feel that people in their organization do not value the importance of collaboration. Team collaboration is all about bringing everyone on the same page. But it is easier said than done. For small businesses, you have the benefit of having to bring fewer people into the same wavelength, but the core challenges of collaboration like communication, transparency, and accountability need to be addressed as much as what bigger players do. So how can small businesses improve team collaboration and promote a culture of continuous employee engagement in their work environment? Here are some tips:

1.Create a Unified Vision

To foster a culture of collaboration, it is important to ensure that all your employees work to achieve a common goal. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a powerful vision for the organization and then seamlessly connect the end objective of every project or work your company undertakes, to this vision statement. This will ensure that irrespective of the team or project an employee is a part of, they will work towards achieving the common goal as defined in the vision. For example, if the vision is total customer satisfaction, then every effort your workforce puts in can be seamlessly translated into steps taken in achieving maximum customer satisfaction. This vision statement or concept can be used in the awareness sessions to help team members bond with each other, understand their responsibilities and realize the need to be accountable for one’s own actions so that the collective effort of the team is successful in the end.

Related Reading: The Office Of The Future – 5 Innovations To Know

2. Smarter On-Boarding

It is often found that new joiners in a company or in a team face difficulty in getting acquainted with the culture and nature of work in the first few weeks or months in the company. This is predominantly due to weak onboarding policies at small companies which pretty much focuses on sharing a couple of PowerPoint slides about the company and expecting new joiners to automatically align themselves with the goals and culture prevalent. Instead, companies should cultivate a smarter onboarding experience by getting rid of boring presentation sessions and documents. They should instead, pair newcomers with an existing team member who can guide them into the company’s routine and help them adapt faster to the culture prevalent in the workplace.

3.Ensure Effective Task Management

There are many instances where employees need to collaborate and work together on projects. In today’s highly competitive talent market, some of these employees may be remotely located as well. Small businesses need to invest in empowering your resources to collaborate efficiently over tasks irrespective of where they are geographically located. Using a powerful platform like Infince, your business can ensure there is a virtual space for employees to work together and with accountability for each action. Such platforms allow you to monitor task progress, enable smooth interaction between colleagues, facilitate the exchange of files and documents related to work and much more. Managers can efficiently manage their team with improved transparency and unbiased decision, thanks to insights from such employee management solutions. The end result is better team collaboration and improved productivity levels in the organization. When tasks and people are brought under a common technology framework, it keeps employees organized, managers aware of their team’s progress and clients happy about fulfilled commitments on delivery.

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

4.Encourage Transparent Communication

A key driver of team collaboration in any business environment is open and transparent communication. Only when people strike a comfortable level of conversation with each other, do they develop mutual respect, trust, and understanding for their colleagues. For organizations, there are several ways to encourage a culture of open communication. A big part of the exercise involves mentoring managers to promote a healthy atmosphere for open communication and not a culture that works by just giving and obeying orders. 

It is important to bring technology into the picture here to work as an enabler for open communication. Most of the organizations typically use just an email system for employees to communicate. However, employees need more than just a simple email system. Bring on-board a powerful intranet system with social media-inspired virtual news spaces for sharing news and information about the company, activities, and events planned and much more. Employees can express their responses for such intranet posts similar to what they do on social media like Facebook. Another option would be to have a good instant messenger system where employees can converse with each other in real-time for a better understanding of problems and scenarios.

5.Promote Socializing Outside of Work

Every employee in your small business has a side of talent, skill or ability that can help them create healthier conversations and relationships with others. As an organization, you need to create avenues for employees to socialize and celebrate their individual and personal skills. Team building exercises, lunches, dinners, and sponsored team vacations or holidays where employees can get to know their colleagues better are just a few ideas to use. This will enable them to build better working relationships in parallel and stand up for each other in collaborative tasks with more responsibility and trust.

Team collaboration is vital to ensuring the continuous growth and success of every small business. Having the right vision, the most relevant business processes and the best technology is the way forward to achieving excellence in team collaboration. Get in touch with us to see how Infince can be the game-changer in enabling a collaborative and productive work culture within your organization.