Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

The journey of building a successful small business involves several challenges. You need to understand and measure every step of your growth and this is where Key Performance Indicators or KPIs become a mainstay in your day to day operations. In simple words, KPI can be defined as a collection of checks that helps you understand whether your business is progressing in the right direction by doing the right things.

A large number of small business management or decision-makers find it difficult to understand what KPI’s they need to measure. Studies show that over 50% of small and medium business owners struggle to find even a single KPI that can be used to measure their growth strategy. 

If you are among that half of the entrepreneur population, here is a list of 5 important KPI’s you can start to measure at your small business growth:

Related Reading: How To Build A Highly Productive Remote Workforce

1. Profit per employee

Very often decision-makers face a dilemma in their staffing priorities. The end result is mostly going for wrong hiring in bulk when your business really isn’t mature to afford such an influx of talent. A key KPI that can help you solve this puzzling scenario is to measure the profit each employee contributes to the company in terms of revenue realized. 

If you keep a benchmark value, then hiring targets can be automatically aligned to ensure that profit per employee stays on track with expected profit figures. This profit figure per employee needs to be calculated every month for your first few years in the business to ensure that you can accommodate the growth pace that usually happens in a sporadic manner in the initial days.

2. Revenue per Customer

In the beginning, any customer revenue is appreciable but as you grow, there needs to be a clear direction on who your sales and marketing teams need to focus. For this, you need to arrive at a KPI for revenue per customer. With time, your operations should focus on continuing good relationships with your initial customers but your sales and marketing should be focused on attracting and on-boarding customers having higher revenue potential. For this, a measurement of revenue per customer as a KPI is necessary at all levels.

3. Sales and Marketing Metrics

As a business owner, you feel relaxed when your marketing and sales team ensures that a healthy lead pipeline is in place for future growth. This has to be a key KPI that needs constant checks as it can decide the course of action for almost every operational team in your organization based on the influx of deals from this pipeline.

Related Reading: Becoming Small Business Leaders In 2020: What You Need To Know

4. Time to Market

It is the time you need to bring a product or service to the market so that customers can purchase it. This is a KPI that is needed to ensure that you incorporate customer feedback, market trends and long term vision into your business growth strategies. In the initial days, there will be lesser influence from limited external stakeholders, but as the business grows, you need more inputs and consider more impact areas before launching every new product or service to ensure that you are able to meet stakeholder expectations across every segment.

5. Cash Reserves

At the end of the day, every business’s stability in the market is judged by the financial muscle it displays due to the cash reserve it has at its disposal. As such, it is one of the most important KPI’s you need to keep track of as a business owner. This is a driver behind several departmental operations such as budgeting, recruitment, infrastructure investments and much more. 

Keeping your employees re-assured on their job security as well as your customers on agreed timelines of service or product delivery is possible if you have a clear vision of how cash reserves are growing as a KPI. A negative growth indicates that you need to keep investments on the check and re-imagine your strategies while a positive outlook on this KPI means that you can go ahead and scale your business risk-free.

Key Performance Indicators are a way to ensure your business has the right checks in place for a sustained growth phase irrespective of how the market operates. To successfully measure and track your KPI’s, there is a need for a comprehensive data-driven digital infrastructure that serves each department in your business from Finance to IT to marketing and operations. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. Get in touch with us to know more.

5 Tips for Small Business Leaders to Stay Ahead of the Game in 2020

It is quite easy for a small business or startup to get immersed in the competition flooding the market and never really swim ashore. Those who want to survive and succeed in the storm needs to have a considerable idea of how to use successful strategies to win customers despite the competition. In 2020, if you were to seek tips on how to grow an SMB into a successful business, the most dominant answer you will receive is to invest in technology that can help you deliver better customer experiences and drive more revenue from your operational channels. Keeping this fact in mind, let us examine a few tips and ideas to help small business leaders remain on the top this 2020.

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

1. Building an automated business environment

Today you can empower your workforce to focus more on value-added jobs while mundane and repetitive tasks can be automated and seamlessly managed by innovative software. Automation can be implemented across every department in your small business, like Accounting, HR, Administration, Customer Relationships and much more. 

It does not replace human resources in any of these departments but provides you the flexibility to run these operations with limited resources and better efficiency. This will lead to lowered cost of operations as well as lesser managerial overhead and will ultimately provide better returns on your investment.

2. Intelligent Personalization for Customer Experience

Any business, small or big, needs to deliver an experience that customers would enjoy interacting with. However, with the rise of digital-savvy consumers, it is important to digitally transform your customer-facing operations as well. A simple example would be setting up an online retailing option for your small store wherein customers could place orders from the comfort of their homes through a web browser or even better, a dedicated smartphone app. 

In order to win an upper hand in the digital endeavor, small businesses need to rely on intelligent personalization for their customer service. Providing services or offerings based on factors such as budget, tailored offers, and discounts, geographical or demographic preferences, etc. will enhance your customers’ loyalty.

3. Smart Marketing

Small business leaders and startups face a need to garner attention from potential customers at the earliest after they have started business operations. Today, the fastest way to reach out to potential customers is through social media and other digital channels of interactive marketing. 

Using insights from a powerful CRM to drive efficient email campaigns and through intelligent sentiment analysis of your brand in social media, it becomes easier to win customers’ hearts. Powerful social media management and email automation tools can help you in reaching out to a large yet more qualified audience who have higher conversion chances.

4. AI-Driven Services

Artificial intelligence has become a mainstream technology today and is found in almost every consumer segment ranging from things as simple as a music app in our smartphone to highly sophisticated security systems. Small businesses are without a doubt, one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI evolution. 

With AI, they have the arsenal of serving more value for customers without having to spend heavily like established business houses. Things such as recommendations, automated customer service management via chatbots, the predictive forecasts for business revenue, etc. are all made possible by the implementation of AI platforms within the business.

5. Workforce Empowerment

The digital transformation wave that can propel your SMB into successful growth is not restricted to your customer-facing operations alone. Your employees are your biggest asset and brand promoters. Making their lives better through technology is a key factor in enabling sustainable growth in your business. 

Providing virtual spaces for teams to collaborate irrespective of their geographical location, powerful collaboration and communication platforms, secure file exchange systems, and intelligent marketing and sales automation systems contribute to making a seamless employee experience in your organization. When employees have access to the tools and digital channels, they need to work better, it ultimately creates a positive impact on the service they offer to your customers.

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

In today’s highly competitive market conditions, small business leaders and startups can use technology to grow sustainably and grab market share from established biggies. The only requirement here is to choose the right digital channels and a reliable partner to guide them in their digital transformation journey. With a proven track record of enabling digital transformation for some of the most successful small businesses worldwide, InfinCE can be the digital magic your business was waiting for. Get in touch with us to explore how.

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.

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 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.

Top Must Watch Trends in Enterprise Video Conferencing

In an office environment, a meeting is scheduled often to not just communicate information, but as a means to establish, nurture and prosper relationships- both new and existing- between all involved stakeholders. This calls for a better solution for conferencing than conventional telephone and audio conferencing solutions. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay in today’s dynamic workspaces where technology facilitates remote working from anywhere in the world. The added benefit of sourcing talent from across the globe for your unique needs and not having to spend on physical infrastructure to accommodate them is a boon, especially for small and medium enterprises. Video conferencing offers far higher levels of engagement and collaboration opportunities when compared to other employee communication channels. So what will video conferencing enable for your workforce today?

Here are 5 trends in the workplace that find seamless adaptability with the aid of video conferencing.

1.Accountable Remote Workforce

As mentioned initially, today the large millennial population in the workforce has made the demand for remote work options quite high. Employees want to work out of their own comfort with more freedom than a typical office environment. As for employers, they are left with no option but to allow this flexibility for hiring the best talent to enable their growth. This is precisely the area where video conferencing can bring in the most impact. Today, successful organizations manage their remote workforce efficiently through video conferencing.

Team meetings and presentations involve live video streams from every employee location to ensure that all team members are present and aware of their roles and responsibilities. This is the next best thing to having everyone in a single room and sharing their responsibilities in front of the large group. So the video collaboration platform that is deployed across your enterprise requires a transparent login and access control policy that will ensure participant interactions are tracked and logged for future reference.

2.Smaller and Smarter Meeting Rooms

When you have fewer employees in the office and more on a remote basis, the need for physical meeting spaces diminishes inside the office. However, meeting rooms need to have, smarter equipment to ensure that team meetings conducted over video conferencing can be efficiently executed. Proper projection screens or televisions, audio, lighting and camera infrastructure that is able to vividly capture and present video streams for everyone involved in the meeting are an absolute necessity.

For remote working staff, they need a simpler solution like a mobile app which allows them to easily join the video conferencing stream and share information with their peers. While choosing your video collaboration platform, ensure that it offers all these levels of flexibility that will enable all stakeholders to seamlessly engage in video conversations.

Related Read: Why should a small business opt for INFINCE?

3.Content Sharing Platforms

In addition to enabling every team member to see each other, video conferencing platforms need to provide the ability to share files and other content in accordance with better compression and security policies to ensure lower bandwidth consumption and safer data transmission. This is vital for remotely working employees as they often have to collaborate with their peers in office for reviews and clarifications on their work in progress which may be files, documents, etc.

Your video conferencing solution needs to take into account the desired storage and streaming requirements for file sharing as well as the capability of doing so from even a mobile app. With flexible content sharing ability, employees will be empowered to work better from anywhere as they already have an efficient video communication channel which is also a powerful collaboration system as well.

4.Cloud-Enabled Video Conferencing

For small and medium businesses to remain competitive and cost-efficient in the market, they need to have flexible spending and management ability for their IT infrastructure. Video conferencing being a part of this infrastructure needs to follow a similar trend as well. This is why enterprises need to focus on cloud-based video conferencing solutions like INFINCE that offer easy scalability and better cost efficiency when they need to dynamically scale up or down their usage patterns over time. Additionally, adding new capabilities to your video communication and collaboration infrastructure is easier when it is cloud-based and depending on your needs, the most appropriate pricing plan can be easily configured.

5.Unified Communications

If your core business is not technology, then having to manage a host of solutions for team management and communication like video conferencing, audio conferencing and other intra-organizational collaboration will be a difficult activity requiring considerable workforce effort. This is where unified communication platforms make a difference.

They allow employees to easily switch between communication and collaboration channels on the go depending on their convenience. This will certainly improve productivity as employees are not forced to shuttle between various apps during a conversation. Enhanced collaboration would also enable teams to quickly arrive at decisions and enable work to be done collectively and within stipulated timelines.

Video conferencing is an irreplaceable communication channel for today’s organizations if they aim to build a robust and reliable work culture both in-house and with their extended remote peers. It will be best to have a scalable and cost-efficient technology backbone in your organization that will offer solutions for management, video conferencing and integrated employee collaboration all the same place.

By seamlessly, enabling businesses to build their technology infrastructure on the cloud, INFINCE is the right choice for a better workplace in your business. From providing powerful collaboration and IT deployment options in the cloud to facilitating highly engaging video-enabled collaboration, INFINCE can be your businesses best bet for digital transformation. Talk to our experts to know how your business can utilize the power of INFINCE.

Top 5 Possibilities You Must Explore to Build The Office of the Future

While most leaders look at ways to keep their business competitive with upcoming market trends, they often fail to look at areas that may seem less important. But in reality, these few areas can make a huge difference in improving the competitiveness of your workforce. This will ultimately impact your business’s bottom line as well. One such area is re-imagining your office to empower your workforce to work better in an increasingly innovation led landscape. The office of the future is beyond the four walls of a building and focuses more or deriving value from resources rather than enforce policies to keep them engaged at work. From communication to collaboration, the digital transformation wave has created new possibilities in every aspect of an office environment. It’s never too late to re-imagine your office to suit the needs of tomorrow, but the longer it takes for you to note the trends that shape the future, further down will be your innovation index in a competitive market. To solve this dilemma and empower you with the right decision, we have compiled a list of the top 5 trends, every future office will witness in the coming years. Make sure you explore each in detail and invest wisely.

Remote Work

Studies show that at least 70%of the global workforce works remotely at least once a week. In fact, the millennial generation rarely opts for a company that forces them to relocate from their hometown and be at the office physically all through the year. By offering a flexible work environment, it has been proven that employees are happier and feel more engaged at doing their work which will reflect positively on their output and productivity. The question now is “How can a remotely located workforce work together with in-house staff to drive value for the company?”

The answer lies in technology solutions like INFINCE, that help organizations manage their employees irrespective of where they are located. INFINCE enhances collaboration and work quality by creating a virtual unity for the entire workforce irrespective of their location. Besides, such a cloud-based platform can save cost considerably by allowing employees to work remotely and save on infrastructure.

Diverse Communication Platforms

When we say office communication, the common items that run into our minds are email and VOIP calls. But today the horizon of office communication has evolved considerably from just these two options. There are social media styled intranet tools available to help employees engage better with their peers and these intranets also serve as announcement boards for various purposes. Open positions, important event announcements, new policy or process announcements, are just some of the key elements that can be communicated through such platforms to your organization as a whole.

Besides, such platforms also offer multiple levels of access controls and permission-based roles for different teams to communicate with other internal employees as well as with external vendors and partners. The office of tomorrow definitely needs a big boost in terms of offering flexible communication platforms and very often scenarios demand multiple communication tools be integrated to work together efficiently and offer the best experience for employees in all your office locations both in-house and remotely. Having the right technology infrastructure to promote open communication is a key factor in keeping your office communication standards competitive with the best in your industry.

Digitally Empowered Workforce

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will seek its entry into mainstream office culture in the near future. Smart office assistants will be guiding employees through business processes just like how virtual assistants like Google Now and Siri guides consumers. Intelligent notifications, schedules, alerts, and information discovery assistants will help employees work better and faster to deliver better value to the enterprise.

Additionally, organizations can keep a check on their employees’ health through smart wearable tech devices like bands and watches. These can double up as digital access cards to help employee’s access office infrastructure without having to carry an ID card and similar items. The stage is set for large scale digital transformation of employee productivity and a combination of intelligent data processing as well as connected hardware will form the basis of this transformation. Your workforce will be more empowered in the office of the future and will require less time to adapt to new work requirements and office spaces.

Innovative Meeting Spaces

Workplace interactions are pivotal in fostering a healthy work culture irrespective of the industry your business operates. Very often, there are requirements where multiple folks have to brainstorm and discuss to arrive at a solution for a business or operational challenge. The traditional meeting rooms where such solutions get their starting are evolving rapidly. In the future, we will witness the rise of virtual meeting rooms that combine multiple telecommunication mediums with technology innovations like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR).

Presentations will never be the same as in the future, you can expect human presenters to remotely take sessions through VR or AR guided imaging. While teleporting and other similar sci-fi movie stuff is not a guaranteed innovation, virtual meeting rooms where teams across the world can communicate through an immersive video conferencing platform is sure to take off in the coming years. This will transform meetings from their boring themes of today and make the audience and participants more engaged with facts and interactive presentations. This also interleaves with our first prediction of flexible remote work as employees who are away from the office can also take part in interactive sessions through such innovative conferencing solutions.

Greener & Smarter Buildings

Across the globe, entrepreneurs are becoming more aware of their role in creating a better working world by contributing not just social wealth but also by creating an environment-friendly workspace. In the US alone, the number of construction projects that have LEED certification has risen from just around 296 in 2006 to over 65,000 in 2017. While remote work options will be in plenty in the future, the demand for a solid physical office space for corporate affairs will always be there. This need will be transformed into a need for greener buildings that consume less of our energy resources to keep the building ventilated, illuminated and visually appealing.

From conserving water to harvesting solar energy to power electrical systems, companies will continue to invest in making their businesses as environmentally friendly as possible. For such aspirations to reap value at the earliest, future office spaces will make use of the Internet of Things (IoT) powered sensors and hardware to ensure that their efficiency levels are high. Automatic lighting and cooling systems based on occupancy, smart cleaning and maintenance infrastructure, intelligent water and waste management systems, etc., will be crucial in creating a higher green print for office buildings of the future.

The office of the future will have a large number of revolutionary innovations to help employees deliver better work outputs. We have captured the 5 most important possibilities that will become a reality soon at future offices. The digital wave will continue to disrupt the traditional workspace culture and employees will witness a new era of connected and secure workplace that help them work from anywhere and anytime without glitches.

Businesses need to invest in making their technology infrastructure secure and more flexible to adapt to innovations such as the ones we explored in this blog. The best way to begin will be to onboard next-generation enterprise technology platforms like INFINCE to seamlessly transit into a digital-first business. Talk to our experts to see how your business can compete with the best in the industry through digital excellence.