One often hears the phrase “technology is your friend” To what extent the friendliness/support is, in being a most effective “companion” to assist you to cope with your daily activities or business plans depends on how you embrace it.
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We often hear the phrase “technology is your friend” To what extent this friendliness is, to help you to cope with your daily activities or business plans depends on how you embrace it.
Life can be chaotic. Which so much to do it is easy to frequently miss important appointments. Delays often come from having to wait till you get to a PC to respond or not remembering contact details. The worst is having to ask someone repeatedly for their number or business cards.
If you often experience that, you are getting it all wrong and definitely need this friend!
Emails are on a progressive, disruptive path to eliminate postal services. They even facilitate and encourage the acceptance of digitally signed documents.
Most financial companies and legal institutions in many developed countries already accept digitally signed documents.
Your digital signature confirms that the information originated from you and has not been altered through encryption. This makes it legally binding.
Naturally, you need special software or Adobe Sign, to digitally sign and attach as a PDF to an email.
Thanks to emails, we can now also easily store and get in touch with our contacts. It could be in the office, lounging around a park, watching your children play; even onboard/at the underground train station.
Calendar and contacts syncing is a simple tool which is not offered entirely by all domain host providers. It works wonders along with your calendar and scheduler.
If you need a simple CRM tool to just help with email contacts and plug into an existing sales app, you can do so with a useful add-on like Outlook Customer Manager.
There are certainly advantages of decluttering your emails. This helps to alleviate the frustration of unimportant mails getting in the way of the ones you need to access frequently. For that, there is a clutter service offered by Office 365.
Additionally, to avoid retaining important attachments, and clogging up space on your mailbox, you can with a click, save large file attachments directly to your cloud storage.
With all that relevance of emails, it is critical that you source the best one – even if it costs a bit more than the (free) webmail services provided by Outlook (Hotmail), Gmail and Yahoo.
Naturally, with a paid service, you will almost be freed from the scourge of spam and malicious items embedded in documents. In some cases, they are screened even before landing in your mailbox.
Other perks like a ‘catch-all service’, data loss prevention, in place-hold (compliance features), and advanced threat protection. You can add them as essential services to give you an even more peaceful emailing experience.
You can, for instance, use In-Place Hold (Litigation Hold) to place user mailboxes ‘on hold’ and preserve mailbox items permanently.
This feature is especially crucial for those in the financial and legal sectors – requiring emails and its contents to be preserved for a minimum of seven years typically. Security is the central factor that has kept the postal service in business – well at least for now.
• A decent-sized mailbox – with archiving ability – 50GB is the new standard size (don’t get short-changed!).
• Should allow you to sync emails, calendars, and contacts onto multiple devices – and it must always work!
• SMTP is now the standard and preferred Email protocol. If you are still on POP3 or even IMAP – run away!
• Customizable domain (a .com or .net or any other you have bought), with the option to add more domains and email aliases. (info@ …sales@ etc).
• Sync to an active directory – to keep your user-profile and allow for ease of single sign-on or extra security features like two-factor authentication. (Prevents unauthorized people from accessing your emails by pairing to your phone via an SMS code).
• Your mailbox (since you are storing contact details or using it along with a CRM or ERP solution) must be GDPR-compatible.
Finally, a good email hosting service should provide the ability to add innovative features in the future. These include extra archiving space, advanced threat protection, and enterprise voicemail. These are characteristics of a good email solution.
Preparing to use an email solution can be effortless if you have the time. Most software suppliers like Microsoft (Office 365), have support sites with primary training material and “how-tos”.
Working in a service industry environment can come with its operational challenges. When you are dealing with customers, it is easy to get overwhelmed with contacts, referrals, emails, and appointments.
There are, however, solutions designed for small to medium-sized businesses, that will help you keep track of processes through well-coordinated business automation.
Traditionally, business (process) automation is the task of an individual or team overseeing the digital transformation of your company. This role has been refined into what is now formally recognized as a business analyst. It involves a highly detailed audit of your business’s processes and workflows.
This is priced as an input (operational) cost or some form of revenue. The business analyst is a role like that of a quantity surveyor – but essentially with operational software.
The aim is to minimize your operational costs while expanding revenue via the tools and processes used to run your business.
A collaboration tool like Skype for Business can help you avoid unnecessary inter-departmental meetings. This would save you loads in travel, hotel, food, and other expenses.
A quick assessment or analysis can help you shift the focus and costs away from a non-responsive product to one that will drive profits.
If a potential product required more attention from a quality or marketing point of view, you can pick up trends using a good business intelligence (BI) tool.
The application would pool all your numbers (prices, product-related interactions) usually stored in your Excel sheets. You could then present in real-time to reflect sales, revenues, staff retention, product demand, elasticity, and return on investment.
These useful actions and reports can be performed with a few clicks of the mouse using the right BI software. Again. this saves you time in meetings and limits the unnecessary requests for data from your colleagues.
That brings us to the next tool that helps you to collate data into central repositories for quick access. File-servers have existed for several decades but are outdated as they can crash. They can also slow down when overloaded or just not hold compatible data.
Secure online file-sharing solutions can help you resolve this. By “online”, we mean the data can be accessed remotely from anywhere in the world on any device with a broadband connection.
But what is the point of having data centrally stored when you cannot access it once you leave a certain parameter/network?
When it comes to security concerns (people outside the organization or worse yet – a competitor, accessing your data), you can rest assured!
File-sharing providers have long thought about it. After all, none of them want to get sued for losing your data!
Today several banks and even public institutions consume utilize cloud services for this very reason. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google are making their services more secure as well as compliant to data storage regulations nationally or globally.
They are, however, forced to charge you a small fortune for that added service!
There several examples of how automation helps you streamline or improve operations. For more practical examples and a cost-effective and easy-to-use online tool that you can use, check out Messegely.
Consider social media integration (to where most of your targetable markets are). “Social engagement” is progressively becoming a buzzword.
Having applications that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram used to be ‘nice-to-haves’. They are now a necessity if you want to stay in touch with your audience or market.
The onus is on your business analyst to source the right (most effective) SaaS tools to help channel the digitalization of your company’s social and business operations.
Not doing this may leave you at the mercy of creative destruction. Consider companies like Yahoo, Nokia, and Blackberry.
Failing to adapt to a changing landscape or being rigid with the innovation. Nokia and Blackberry allowed Apple and Samsung to snatch their market share with touchscreen tech.
Failing to streamline how you operate can cloud your judgment. This will lead to you failing to even grasp what the customer needed in the first place!
Automation can help you pay more attention to the client’s needs because you spend less time taking notes. Instead, you will be able to perform the most important task when dealing with customers – listen!
Visit the resources page for an array of top-ranked automation tools you can use. These tools will ensure that you are being as productive as you can – saving you time and of course money in the long run.
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