Simple Ways to Perfect Your Work From Home Routines

With this being the ultimate solution to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are now highly encouraging remote working environments. But, it’s also true that “working from home” is not an easy job. When you have your kids and family around, no maids coming in, and your email loaded with urgent work messages amidst loaded household chores, work from home seems nearly an impossible task.

But at this point of time, where your business needs more efficient employees at toes, it’s no time to go down on work or get distracted. Although balancing your work time and home time might seem a bit challenging, it is not impossible if you know how to do it right. Here are some simple yet effective tips to help you work better, stay productive, and keep aside valuable family time.

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.

Why empower your workforce with project management software?

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

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

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

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

1. Consolidate Work

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

2. Track Customer Sentiments

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

3. Foster a Collaborative Culture

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

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

4. Manage Dependencies

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

5. Empower Leadership Decision Making

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

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

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

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

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.

How retail marketers can create more dynamic and engaging email content

Email marketing is here to stay, at least for the next decade or so. Statista reports that by 2023 there will be over 4.3 billion active email users globally. Retailers have been using emails as a powerful means to convince shoppers to return for bigger purchases and also to cross-sell based on their customers’ purchasing history. The scenario did not change pretty much when e-commerce started to dominate the retail world.  However, now the challenge that retailers face with their email marketing strategies is to develop interactive and engaging content that can drive conversions from the target audience. So how can you make your retail marketing emails more interactive and engaging?

Here are a few ideas that could help you out:

1. Focus on personalization

Personalization is one of the best ways to bring more engagement in any conversation, be it across any channel and email is no exception. Across the globe, surveys have shown that over 33% of all marketers believe that personalization is the most important capability to have in their customer outreach strategy. By tailoring your marketing email to suit the unique needs and preferences of each recipient, the chances of them trying to glance at your content and further initiate a positive response are high. Leading companies use technology such as big data analytics to gain insights for delivering personalized experiences via email marketing.

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

2. Identify the right audience

While personalization is a great way to connect with customers or potential customers, it is just one side of a coin that will help you. The other is identifying the right audience for an interactive email campaign. Sales or marketing personnel who organize such email campaigns should be able to segregate and create separate lists of target email recipients for each copy based on information from their CRM system. The list may be classified based on several factors such as time zone, preferences, spending budget history, demographics, regional and personal specialty time periods and much more. The better the segregation, the easier it will be the task of content creators to build more personalized email content.

3. Intelligent Cross-Sell

Brands need to make it a point to follow up on customer purchases with cross-selling opportunities. For example, if a person books an air ticket, an email giving the option for them to choose their seat should be sent within a very short time span after the booking for gauging more interest. The email sent for seat selection can either be interactive and allow the user to select the seat from the email itself or it can simply provide a link to a landing page that has an interactive seat map for the user to view and choose accordingly. The key factor here is the near real-time email marketing that will do the trick and land more monetization opportunities for the business.

4. Mobile Friendly

Did you know that 49% of all emails are opened on a smartphone? Hence, irrespective of the content you stuff in an email, it is important to visualize how it will appear in a smartphone display before you shoot out the campaign to recipients. By limiting the scrolls a user has to make and giving them an action item in the first sight, you have more chances of getting them to interact with the email.  Fonts, buttons, and other interactive elements should be designed to be more responsive in smartphone screens and the entire email should be light in size to load completely. Delays would drive away users be it on smartphones or in desktop browsers.

5. Embedding Rich Media

One of the best ways to engage recipients is to include rich media. This could be a visually appealing image or a short video that can be played within the email interface or an interactive survey or poll. A catchy email subject line can bring in more views for the rich media content and if your media are intuitively planned and executed, it will incite more responses from your target audience. Several leading companies use email as their primary mode of gauging feedback from their customers and often publish their survey results or individual feedback (with consent) as a testimony for their offerings. This will improve their loyalty perception in the market and will ultimately lead to more organic sales revenue.

For retail marketers, interactive retail marketing emails will be one of their most critical assets to gain new customers and improve sales. This is one of the key reasons, why your business needs to have a powerful digital platform like INFINCE to handle key operations such as customer relationship and marketing. With intelligent marketing automation and CRM capabilities, INFINCE can empower retail marketers to win more customer hearts with interactive emails. Get in touch with us to know more.

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.

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.