When running an SME, there’s always a need to keep costs down while accessing the best services and tools to operate the business and keep it streamlined. Often, your business can benefit from working with larger operations that offer services obtained at an affordable rate based on actual usage, while skipping all the staffing and infrastructure costs involved.
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This is very helpful for an SME with limited capital to invest but that requires call center services, or a sophisticated project management tool without the development costs.
Here are several tech tools and services that fit the bill.
Multi-faceted Call Center
The Small Business Owner’s Complete Guide To Successful Outsourcing
A multi-faceted outsourced call center like Humach provides companies the ability to indirectly handle a significant volume of customer calls without investing in extra office space, staffing, and phone equipment. The need for representatives to handle not only phone calls, but also email, social media messages, and live chat on the website presents a challenge for SMEs that don’t have significant staff or resources to devote to such an extensive operation.
Dealing with a solution provider that delivers a comprehensive solution to satisfy customer service needs allows a smaller SME to focus on their core business products and services without getting bogged down in minutia. Leaving customer services to specialists that can handle multi-channel communications avoids unnecessary distractions just before a product launch or during peak business periods. The Humach Labs program also permits this service-based company to test new solutions carefully before deploying them through their customer service teams, which ensures consistent performance.
Kanban Boards for Organization
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Managing many tasks and projects across different people and departments expands in complexity the faster the company grows. To manage this situation, going beyond mere To-Do lists is necessary. By switching to a Kanban system of boards, like those offered with the Trello app, it’s possible to divide up tasks into each state of progress.
One approach is to split tasks into a “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done” board structure. Another is to use a time-frame to indicate when tasks should be tackled. This could include boards for “Now,” “Soon,”, “One month, “Six months,” and “One year” to give a sense of when tasks should be moved over to the ‘Now’ board. Using an app like Trello which supports multiple users and teams, it’s possible to assign individual tasks to multiple team members, set timeframes and add notes. For instance, if you have to print out some business cards using Lanyardsfactory.com.au to distribute to potential customers at an event in a few week’s time, you can add this to your “soon” list and be reminded when the time is appropriate.
Team Project Management
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Asana is another app that’s grown popular for organizations that have gone from 1-10 people up to something larger that needs a more comprehensive solution. Asana is designed to be project management software for teams who may work on multiple projects at the same time. It includes task and project planning, setting milestones to reach within a given project, due dates and more.
The same Kanban boards approach is used including a flexible drag and drop interface. Multiple software platforms are supported to let staff access the latest position on projects at the office, on-the-go or in an off-site meeting. Asana also integrates neatly with over 100 other software packages to share data for a better-informed view.
There are many business tools available for companies on a budget looking for affordable solutions to help their workforce stay better organized and more productive. For these companies, using a customer service solutions provider also makes sense to stay on-point with the goal of driving growth through the business.
