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Advantages of Outsourced Answering Services

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Advantages of Outsourced Answering ServicesOutsourcing different aspects of your business can help you save time, money and focus. You can send your books to an accountant, your calls to an answering service and your intelligence technology management to an IT firm, while you concentrate on the core projects and tasks that build your company up. Some of the benefits you will see from outsourcing your answering and receptionist services include being able to extend your customer service hours, save money and focus your efforts.

Extend Your Call Hours

Many answering services offer call-in hours around the clock and on all days, with the phones being answered by real people instead of an automated system. This gives your customers the opportunity to talk to someone and resolve issues outside of your normal operating hours without you having to keep employees working at all hours. You can even find mobile apps from these services to help you keep track of messages and leads in one place. This can lead to better customer retention and higher profits.

Save Money

Outsourcing can save you money both in terms of salaries and in terms of space needed for the extra personnel. You will not have to hire and train employees to answer the phones and then dedicate a place in your building for them. An outsourced receptionist service will have many clients to help cover their costs as well as the beefed-up phone plans to keep up with everything. Many will offer personalized call scripts so your brand’s voice and culture will be presented to the customer when they call just as it will be when they walk in your office.

Focus on Core Activities

When you do not have to pay for a dedicated employee to answer your phones, you can more closely focus on the core activities that make your company great. For example, if you own a catering business, then having another company answer your phones will give you more time to develop new recipes and finish orders without worrying about the calls coming in.

Outsourcing can help startups survive the first few years of business with less overhead and can streamline operations for huge corporations. When you outsource your call answering with a receptionist service, you can see increased customer service and retention as well as lowered costs. This gives you more time to focus on other aspects of your company such as making new products. You can also extend your customer service hours outside of your office hours and help clients around the clock without paying overtime.

Managing Your Business with Location Mapping

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What are businesses to do with the explosion of data occurring in the marketplace? The ideal solution is to put it to work.

Chances are, you already knew that. However, we’re willing to bet that you aren’t using your data to its full extent. For example, are you using the locations of your current customers to find hidden insights about your business? Didn’t think so.

But how can you find these insights in your data without burning yourself out? With location mapping tools, it’s a piece of cake.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Managing Your Business with Location Mapping

Location heat mapping in action, courtesy of Maptive.com

Let’s look closer at what location mapping is and how it can help manage your business.

What is Location Data?

Most location data is information that comes from a mobile device, such as a tablet or a smartphone. This data provides the current position of the user. It can also simply come from spreadsheet data that you have collected from your customers.

With smartphone use on the rise, location data only continues to grow. At first, it might seem that all of this data would add to the complexity of the business landscape. However, this information brings power and makes the information easier to understand.

Location Mapping Can Help Your Business

As you exploit location mapping, you gain the information needed to make smart business decisions.

Location intelligence showcases the relationship between the data in a way you might not have seen without the analytics. With these advanced insights, you can quickly see where your customers are, where there is room to grow, and so much more.

You can also use location mapping to set boundaries, label points of interest, segment the demographics, analyze interest and assess risk. Instead of relying on spreadsheets, bar graphs and pie charts, you can showcase your data with the help of a useful map.

Location Mapping Case Study: Starbucks

Wondering what companies are using location data? Look no further than the coffee in your hand.

Starbucks has found incredible success through location intelligence. By using their rewards app to offer freebies and special offers, Starbucks has received valuable data worth far more than a free coffee.

The coffee giant now knows what products each customer likes; and they can quickly extract information about purchasing habits from that data. On its own, this would create overwhelming amounts of data, but Starbucks uses the information to personalize content, laser-focus their marketing, and make ordering coffee easier than ever.

This information also helps Starbucks determine where to put up new locations; and it also helps them decide what items to add to their ever-growing menu.

While you might not be as big as Starbucks, it doesn’t take millions to achieve the same results for your small business.

Getting Started with Location Mapping

If you want to turn your data into an easy-to-understand map, here are a few simple steps to follow.

  • Think Spatially: Determine how the place and location data will make a difference for your organization. How will this information help you understand the problems you face and allow you to craft solutions?
  • Perform Due Diligence: Go through the data you have to see how you can enhance it further. What steps do you need to take to ensure its integrity?
  • Collect More Data: What tools can you implement that will give you access to further data? Could you add a rewards app to gain more information about your clients?
  • Be Careful with Partnerships: You don’t want to choose just any location intelligence vendor. It’s vital to gain reputable data and high-quality support. Vet any company you plan to work with.

Most mapping solutions offer a free trial, making it super easy to import your location data from a simple excel spreadsheet.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Managing Your Business with Location Mapping

The key to starting with location mapping is to take the first step. Begin with the information you already have and see what new insights you can glean from using mapping software.

Ways To make Your Business More Efficient

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A business needs to work and keep working for both the owners and the consumers. Inefficiency can be a real problem for businesses, which can end up costing your business a lot of revenue. There are some tricks you can use to make your business more efficient and improve your earning power and productivity.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Ways To make Your Business More Efficient | Entrepreneurship | Business Efficiency

What Isn’t Working?

Before you make any changes, you need to identify the areas of your process that are currently inefficient. When you know where the problem areas are, you can start working out what is causing it. From here, you can create a solution. For example, if your IT team is overworked and stressed, you’ll get more IT downtime, slowing down work. You can fix this by using IT services to tackle business inefficiency caused by technology. Inefficiency can occur in lots of different places. It might be redundant processes, important information that is hard to find and procedures that have been allowed to get out of date. Overcomplicated procedures are also a common problem.

Democratize The Market

Find a way to make the market you work in more democratic, which makes processes faster for staff and consumers, and frees up your team to deal with other parts of their job. Making the process of working with you much smoother and simpler, you can serve more customers and retain them afterward. The easier it is for customers and staff to access technology and information, the smoother and faster your business can operate.

Explore Digital Integration

Digital integration that is inefficient can be a big problem, causing you to be less competitive in your industry. Instead, use digital integration that can streamline your work, cutting down on the time that is wasted. Digital solutions that are properly integrated can improve efficiency in lots of ways. Technology can be used to automate tasks that are time-consuming, which then allows your employees to focus on tasks that need attention from a human being. Communication is made faster and easier. Reports can be generated and shared with key stakeholders much more quickly. Problems can be found and handled sooner, and employees can communicate with each other much more easily. Proper, thorough digital integration is a must-do solution to inefficiency in a business.

Build An End-To-End Solution

You need to think about the entire system, and consider how your business and product fits into the larger picture. Full integration can help you find more ways to improve your efficiency. If all the parts of your machine work together, things will operate in a more efficient way, allowing you to work on the things that matter.

Build Communities And Resources

A great way to be more efficient in your business is to create communities. The people you meet will help you to open up more opportunities in a natural way. Foster community development with tings like public forums for discussion, networking options and sharing resources. This can generate new ideas, invaluable feedback, and new concepts for you and the other businesses involved.

How To Minimize Your Business To Maximize Growth

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When people start a business, they all head into it with a mindset of owning an empire that sees growth years on year. Now, unfortunately, reaching the level of a global empire isn’t something many of us will achieve, but there is no reason we cannot see constant growth throughout the years.

In this post, we are going to be looking at some very simple things you can do with your business that can show enormous amounts of growth very quickly.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Entrepreneurship | Business Growth | How To Minimize Your Business To Maximize Growth

Why You Are Not Growing

If you have noticed that your business has reached a point where it has hit a metaphorical wall, then the time has come that you need to acknowledge that something is wrong with your business and needs changing.

One of the main issues is possibly that you are allocating your business funding correctly, and you are more than likely spending too much. While you may plan your spending carefully, more often than not, most businesses tend to spend money on things that they just don’t need to.

In the next section, we are going to be looking at a few of these, and hopefully, you will be able make a few changes that see your business start to grow overnight.

Stop Doing Everything

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses seem to make today is that they believe they have to have every department in house. While it used to be the way that your business would require many different departments, the modern world has a solution for this.

You can now take some of your most expensive departments and look at outsourcing them. You can easily find managed IT services and even outside call handlers. If you think logically, you can save up to 80% of your yearly wage budget by simply outsourcing some of your departments.

For many companies, this is a huge amount of cash, once you tackle this problem, think how much your margins change overnight.

Save On The Small Stuff

Other areas you can minimize are things like your workspace and your bills. There are many businesses now opting for shared office complexes. By taking on one of these, you lose the massive bills that come with leasing an office building, and you just pay a set rate monthly.

These complexes are often frowned upon, but the truth is that often they promote so much more productivity than your regular office, and the atmosphere is always amazing.

Sure, these solutions may seem incredibly simple, but you should realize that put together, they can take your business to brand new levels of success. If you are truly looking to make a difference to your end of year figures, then both of these can get you well on your way.

You may also find that once you have started, you will find brand new ways to save money. Just remember, just because you are minimizing doesn’t mean you are failing, it simply means you are thinking outside of the box.

5 Topmost Software That Helps You In Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Entrepreneurship | Business Software | 5 Topmost Software That Helps You In Business

This is 2020, and the world has entered into a new decade, unlocking new windows to the trading world. People nowadays are indulging in various kinds of businesses and earning quality money. Youth is much more interested in becoming an entrepreneur than doing nine to five jobs. Many people are providing guidelines to business, even this, has become a business. People conduct public speaking seminars to spread awareness about entrepreneurship and unique ways to enter into the trading ball.

As you must have experienced, how every field is progressing with time and doing wonders to support each other. IT has embellished business and granted some modern ways to set your feet in it. There is now numerous software that helps in making things easy for an entrepreneur like deputy software. This software enables you to perform better and efficiently. They lessen the risks and present you with a proper platform to execute your plans without any haphazard. Here is a list of top-five software that you can use and grow your business. This list will help you to pick suitable software for your business. Have a look and follow the list,

Deal with Accounts

If you are commencing a business and don’t want to squander your precious time in 2+2=4 (accounts), what will you do? You should hire a person who can solve the account operations. However, after establishing a business, you will realize that you cannot afford to make a mistake in fiscal matters. You will also discern that human beings are not imperiled to commit mistakes. Therefore, what can be the after course? We have a quick account fix for you. You should borrow some help from the IT Department and lift your accounting matters to accounting software.

Presently, you must be wondering what kind of software you can use to handle the finance of your business? You should download QuickBooks software. Do you know anything about this magical wand named QuickBooks? It includes some very convenient features that you need to make things easier for you.

  • You can trust this software with all your business secrets.
  • It will aid you in tracking the cash and provide you with receipts.
  • It creates the invoice and any other business form that you may want to send and receive.
  • You can easily analyze the performance of your business by tapping the screen.

Website Building

As the internet is touching higher skies, every business needs a website. You cannot start a business venture without establishing a website and for that purpose; you need a website building software. People these days ask for the website first because it has turned into a matter of authenticity. The easiest and accessible website building software is Word press. It is free in the beginning and later offers discounted plans. Its features are striking as mentioned below,

  • It offers 300 themes to set up a domain. You can design it by yourself with eminent features.
  • It deports your posts to other social media platforms such as twitter.
  • It is SEO trained and increases the readability of your content.
  • You can dig the stats of the visitors that look into your website.

Digital Marketing

After expanding a topnotch business, you need to spread its name around the town. But how are you going to do this? What are the modern ways of marketing? You know the moves, don’t you? You have to acquire digital marketing software and lift your business through innovative techniques. We suggest you involve ‘Intercom’ in your business. You must be pondering what Intercom is and what it does? It is upscale software that helps entrepreneurs to grasp clients and engage with them. The features it comprised are stated below,

  • Intercom procures clients through artificial intelligence-based chatbots and generates faster links.
  • It forwards convincing emails to the people who sign up and transform them into clients.
  • It has a help desk that allows its members to get help at any moment.
  • You can depend on them with all your clients.

Project management

Everything has been going through a proper discipline but do you retain any idea about your team? How are you going to manage people with inconsistent behaviours, nature, and backgrounds? This whole team management fiasco will exhaust you but wait; we are here so why fear? We have an idea for you to get an instant update about your team members. Get Trello. Don’t know Trello? We’ll never leave you clueless. Trello is a software that promotes companies to manage their projects without any hurdle. It works in a very trendy manner. You obtain this first, make a card, include your team in that card and ask them to update it. Simple, isn’t it? Take a look at its impressive features,

  • You can avail Trello for almost every nature of tasks; family trips or high-end professional projects.
  • You can add attachments, comments and due dates to whatever task you are heading towards.
  • It provides you with a butler. Surprise? Not the real one. Butler boosts productivity through automation and formulates principles, commands, and buttons for your card.

Hiring and human resources

Last but not the least, the field of human resources is extremely important for any business. You cannot hire any Tom, Dick, and Harry without knowing their background. Recruitment CRM carries significance in every kind of business and an ideal relationship between employees and employers. With the uprising scope of the human resources department, candidate relation management (CRM) has taken place in the corporate world to hire suitable candidates. There is software that performs this high-end duty, but smashfly is the best of all. You will believe us after knowing its features,

  • It provides your team with talent acquisition software that helps in analyzing the skills of the suitable candidates.
  • It has an AI-based chatbot that heightens the probability of identifying the candidate through conversing them. Moreover, it schedules meetings for you.
  • It helps in organizing recruitments events without bearing any difficulties and leaves an unforgettable image on candidate’s minds.
  • It enables you to forget about paperwork and turn everything in digital.

These are some easy to use software that enhances the probability of your growth. You should utilize this software and enter into a rapid version of corporate. This is an era of technology boost so gain as much as you can. You are required to decide whatever software your business needs. This is the time to move forward keeping in mind the progressive technology and the fast world. Be smart and watch your step!