We keep coming up with different digital tools to make our business lives easier, which in turn helps us build stronger customer relationships and a resilient brand reputation. In essence, making our internal processes more effective and our teams more productive, the entire brand thrives, and so do our customers. This is something every industry has been utilizing heavily in the past several years, with more brands doing their best to use digitalization as a means to safeguard their professional future.
For new brands to enter the market, the issue becomes apparent: with so many priorities, how do they start implementing different digitalization methods that won’t disrupt their workflow or jeopardize their processes? Whether you’re a new business just starting out and in need of ways to become more productive, or you’re a veteran brand looking to upgrade its internal processes, these are the key five steps to make the most of digitalization in order to ensure greater internal productivity.
Communication done differently
We all love emails, and we use them on a daily basis to communicate with our clients, partners, and to share files within our teams. However, different digital tools can actually simplify and speed up this process to help companies shorten the time which is needed to make decisions. For the majority of modern companies, departments need to work collaboratively and they need to stay in touch in order to make creative decisions.
The least disruptive way to achieve this level of cooperation and creative output is by using simple communication tools the likes of Slack. They are designed for team collaboration, casual conversation, creative exchanges, as well as file exchanges. They let your teams stay on the right track with their goals and tasks while they also communicate with others involved in the process without any delay. The more casual tone of these tools together with emoticons allows employees to work in a more engaging environment, which is helpful for the bottom-line level of productivity.
Improved digital workflow
Some processes that happen in the background can often cause an entire work process to experience a bottleneck. For most modern businesses, producing and keeping track of all the necessary documentation, from employee contracts, customer contracts, confidentiality agreements, NDAs, all the way to privacy policies and the like, can be a time-consuming process that stalls your workflow. Writing them, disseminating them, keeping track of signatures, and making sure they are legally watertight is a real hassle.
However, automatization can help to a great extent when you rely on existing and customizable business document templates that will shave hours off your schedule when it comes to defining all of your collaborations. These documents allow you the flexibility you need to adapt to each client and employee relationship without ever having to worry whether or not a certain document complies with the necessary rules and regulations. They save time and cut costs on these long processes, which in turn allows your people to work without delay.
Reducing distractions
There’s no such thing as a perfect office, or a perfect human being, for that matter – especially today, when we’re easily distracted by a slew of different stimuli, such as sneaking a peek at our social media profiles while working, or having trouble focusing with too many people chattering around. From a digital perspective, there are all kinds of tools you can use to reduce and eliminate some if not all of these common office distractions, which will tremendously impact your office productivity.
Apps such as Rescue Time or Mindful Browsing have different features that can help you keep distractions at bay. They are also very useful for giving you a deeper insight into how your mind works during the day, if you spend too much time on certain sites that are simply a waste of your time, or if you can structure your schedule differently to minimize distractions.
CRM software solutions
If it’s all about the customer, then you need to make sure that you’re doing everything in your power to make those interactions simpler, easy to track, and easy to measure and analyze. That way, all of your efforts will not be without purpose. By implementing CRM software for your teams to use every day, you can help them keep track of more customers at any given moment, never fail to send out an email reminder when necessary, and learn more about their customers’ behavior. Another perk: these platforms are typically easy to scale so that you can add more team members and manage more customers as your business grows.
Luckily, CRM platforms are not stand-alone systems that you can only use to an extent. Actually, they are very flexible and they allow numerous social media integrations, which means that tracking customer communication across different platforms becomes unified and significantly simpler for your team members. It also becomes easier for your teams to delegate tasks, keep track of their sales cycles, and discover new sales opportunities derived from your existing customer behavior patterns.
As we’re moving forward in terms of innovation in every aspect of running a business, digitalization remains a hot topic for new and veteran brands alike. By implementing these simple, but powerful tips, you can help your business make the most of various digital tools and in turn become more productive in the aim to satisfy your customers for years to come.
