In today's highly competitive business environment, you can't afford not to be efficient. Efficient businesses produce more with less resources and generally have happier employees. Those that aren't lose to those who are.
Luckily making your business efficient can be quick, cheap and easy. Here are 6 tips to help.
Manage in real time: Don't review last month's reports to figure out what can be improved upon, watch what is happening in real time and solve problems before they occur. To do this get a business phone system provider that offers a real-time call monitoring dashboard. With a good provider, a Wallboard feature like this can be activated instantly, cost as little as £1 per month and show you how many calls are waiting, how many calls are missed, who isn't answering the phone, how long each person is on the phone and more. Better yet, you should be able to create automatic alerts that give you a heads up when things are going awry - removing the need for you to monitor everything yourself.
Provide anywhere, any device access to employees working on the go: Homeworking, working from the road or working off-site can slow employees down if they don't have access to office directories, voice mail or server files Make sure that your business phone system provider has a mobile twinning feature that allows workers' mobiles to be used just like their office phone when they are on the go. Also make sure your business phone provider offers a teleworking function that gives workers access to their entire office system, phone number and personal set-up from a remote location.
Automatically route incoming calls: Is your receptionist's time most efficiently used by answering and routing calls to the appropriate person? Could he / she be used for more important tasks if call routing happened automatically? Find a business phone system provider that has an 'auto-attendant' function that answers incoming calls and provides a menu to the caller to help efficiently route their call.
Don't keep inefficient employees: Sometimes a business is slowed down purely by certain individuals. These individuals may respond to coaching and feedback, but if they don't - don't keep them around. You don't have time for inefficient employees in an efficiently run business. To ensure you know who is efficient and who isn't, monitor calls with a call recording feature on your phone system. A good business phone system provider will be able to offer you this for only a few pounds a month.
Don't outsource: Often small businesses outsource their IT function or hire a business consultant to help them. Unfortunately this usually means managing the consultant, which is time intensive and doesn't necessarily make anything more efficient as they don't know your business as well as you do. Instead, try using only phone and IT systems that are easily managed online with simple user interfaces and offer free training.
Integrate your email, phone and CRM system: Having a CRM system is a must these days, but getting employees to use it properly is often difficult. Most employees claim it is an inefficient use of their time to have to constantly enter or update records. As such, ensure your email and business phone system provider is able to integrate your CRM system so that emails and calls are automatically updated in records without the employee having to even open the program. Also ensure the integration allows for relevant records to pop-up on screen when a contact is calling.
What to do now?
Find a business phone system provider that can help you implement these things at an affordable price. See www.vtsl.net for more info.