Imagup General Magazine 2024
There is no doubt that every business, especially small, is first of all about the team full of dedicated people and their talented leader. However, these days we cannot afford to ignore various digital tools that can make dealing with everyday business routine making it much faster and easier. We suggest going through ten of them in this article.
Customer Service Tools
1. Zendesk
Zendesk is a multifunctional web tool that simplifies the support team work and increases the level of customer service. Thanks to Zendesk, a company is able to quickly process requests received by the support service, systematize them and respond fast. Requests can be received via email, from social networks, support chat, and other channels. The Zendesk service allows companies to hire remote employees, including those living in other countries, for the role of technical support operators. They can start working immediately by simply entering their username and password.
2. Survey Monkey
SurveyMonkey is a platform for conducting surveys. The service helps to collect information from respondents and analyze statistics. Both free and professional versions of the system are available. The software runs on the web version, so it is available from any device, including mobile phones.
The service is useful in the work of product managers to collect information about the target audience, as well as customer service departments to understand the level of satisfaction with goods and services. With its help, you can analyze the motivation and involvement of company employees, organize a meeting or presentation, and study market trends.
Project Management Tools
1. Zoho Projects App
Zoho Projects offers a web-based project management interface, collaboration tools, tracking software releases, and discussing tasks. At the same time, the project can include files from MS Office, OpenOffice, StarOffice, AutoCAD, Photoshop, ZIP, etc.
Zoho Projects consists of four basic modules — tasks and stages, documents, calendars and meetings with forums. There are also such modules as bug tracking, working hours and billing, knowledge base and discussions.
2. Base Camp
Basecamp is a platform for full-fledged project management. In each new project, you can conduct conversations, add text or other documents, make lists of priority tasks and use a calendar. The administrator can monitor the project and the activity of each team member. Basecamp allows you to easily organize your work with clients or partners. In addition, the application has mobile access. The project management system is extremely simple, but at the same time effective.
Sales & Admin Tools
1. HubSpot
Hubspot is one of the most fully functional free solutions on the CRM market. There are a huge number of functions on the platform. Here you can maintain a database of contacts, organizations and transactions, conduct correspondence with customers, schedule meetings and calls, create and post forms on the site to collect user contacts,
receive requests from customers (tickets) through the site, via a chat on the site or add them manually to the system. This is not the whole list of Hubspot features. And most importantly, the service is absolutely free for any number of users.
2. Quickbooks
QuickBooks is a web service for automating accounting for small businesses and freelancers. It is designed for those who want to save time by simplifying accounting and an integrated financial system. QuickBooks can be used for free by a group of up to five users. You can manage accounts, track sales and expenses, print checks, do online banking, export data to Excel, perform automatic tax calculations and much more.
Marketing tools
1. Mailchimp
MailChimp is a marketing automation platform that appeared in 2001. For a long time, the service provided only services for conducting email newsletters. Today, MailChimp positions itself as a marketing platform for small companies. It is designed for users who independently conduct business or delegate some of the work and authority to their employees. In addition to email newsletters, the service offers landing pages, posting on social networks and a system for creating visual content.
2. Galaksion
One of the effective ways of promoting goods or services your business produces or sells is placing ads on different websites. Finding and selecting suitable websites might be quite challenging, that is why small business representatives can turn to advertising networks like Galaksion. Here you can create an ad and control the targeting settings all by yourself via the user-friendly Self-Service platform or take your product straight to professional advertising managers. Galaksion offers only clean traffic without bots that comes directly from trusted websites. This way a high level of conversions is guaranteed.
Bonus: Why Should Entrepreneur Use Advanced Technology for Their Business
After we highlighted all the tools that your business can use, we would like to move to another lesson. Many small business owners are not even aware of the benefits they can get. The only reason why they are not going digital is the fact that they are not familiar with the advanced technology. However, these are all things that you can easily learn. All the tools that we mentioned are easy to understand, and you do not have to be a genius to figure out how to use them. Even if you need to spend some time researching the tools we talked about, the benefits we will mention below will probably motivate you to do that even more. Because of that, let’s find them out!
Communication Will Be at the Higher Level
Without any doubt, communication within employees in the most successful companies around the world is at the highest level. Project managers will manage to use different tools to assign tasks to other team members even if the entire company is remote. On the other hand, workers as well as managers will easily send feedback or any other pieces of information that can boost the quality of the work. If the information does not circulate throughout the company properly, certain issues will always appear.
On the other hand, the external communication with customers will grow as well. With different digital tools, you will manage to ensure a pleasant customer experience throughout different channels. That is the best way to convert all the leads into customers, and regular customers into the most loyal ones. Doesn’t this seem like a first step to success?
It Is a Money-Saving and Planet-Saving Solution
Do you even have insights into how many kilograms of paper you have spent so far for different business operations? At first glance, paper is relatively cheap, but when you are using it a lot, then it becomes an expensive investment. Instead of doing that, you should go digital and go paperless at the same time. All the documents, pieces of information, and sensitive data will remain safe and circulate through the online world. It is much cheaper to pay for the Internet costs instead of buying tons of papers.
On the other hand, there are certain benefits of digitalization that may not directly help your business, but they can be extremely important for the environment. If you decide not to use paper, a lot of trees out there are going to remain “alive”. Imagine how good it would be for the entire planet earth if all the small, medium, and big businesses decide on this move. Fortunately, many of them are accepting that, and the same trend will probably continue in the future.
You Can Easily Measure Your Results in Real Time
Measuring the results of your work as well as marketing campaigns in real time is a crucial strategy. Unfortunately, doing that without the assistance of digital tools can be quite difficult. In every moment, you will manage to check out how much money you spent, how many people reached your website after an ad campaign, and how many sales you have made. This data will help you determine whether you need to change something around your business or not.
