If you’re a small business owner, you’ll know how difficult it is to keep on top of your workload. You’ll probably be responsible for many of the operational functions of your company, and with that comes a lot of juggling.
One minute you’ll be dealing with recruitment and then team management.
You will probably be spending more time than you’d like processing your company payroll each month. All of these tasks take you away from the core elements of your business.
And when it comes to the bread and butter parts of your operations, you’ll need to manage the workflow, and then deal with your customers.
Whatever your business, be it production, retail, or a service-based company; all of these things are applicable, and whether you like it or not, you will need to manage these tasks.
Tech-savvy entrepreneurs may be able to devise spreadsheets that can handle all of their workflows, and minimize their task management. However, having the skills, knowledge, and time to do these things is out of the question for most people.
Don’t panic, though, because there are plenty of systems out there that can make your life much easier.
Customer Services Management
If your business manages lots of customer queries and ongoing orders, you will need a system that allows you to keep a ticket open.
Using customer relations management software, you’ll be able to keep track of how long a ticket has been open. From this, you can set a target for completion. This allows you to manage your customer workflow effectively.
Using software such as this, you can find all your correspondence with a client easily, and all of their order history. This will save you a great deal of time when it comes to handling the query.
You can pull in customer correspondence from multiple channels, including social media messages.
You’ll be able to measure the response times, to set and manage targets for your customer service team. Creating reports and tracking historical performance data will allow you to monitor customer service trends within your company.
Payroll And HR
Using an integrated payroll and HR system, you can manage all of your staffing needs from one piece of software, which will significantly reduce the amount of administration.
You can create a job vacancy and accept applications. These can be graded based on a series of assessment criteria, which will significantly speed up your pre-screening process. You can choose to only view applicants who score above a certain percentage.
From this, the system can be used to book in interviews via telephone, or in person.
Once a job has been offered, information from the application can be automatically populated to create a digital staff file.
The system can be used for creating and managing staff schedules. These can be easily manipulated.
Staff can access this information digitally by logging in, and all changes can be viewed instantly. This saves having to go through the hassle of communicating staffing rotas with the entire team.
A clocking in system will then record staff attendance, and track any lateness, or additional hours worked. You can monitor for any attendance issues easily, and should this become a disciplinary matter; then you have the information to support the process.
The clock in information and the schedules will form your team’s payroll, which can be confirmed before your staff are automatically paid by bank transfer.
The amount of work involved in this process is significantly lower due to the integration of all systems.
Payroll reports will allow you to track your spending and using these reports in correlation with other information such as ticket response times.
This will help you to get an idea of how productive your team is, and where you can make cost savings when it comes to staffing.
Cloud-Based Systems
Your business should be using cloud-based systems for all of its administration.
Using services such as Google Drive, you can share all documents seamlessly between any staff who have the necessary permission to view the document. This means that there will be no more messing around attaching files to emails.
Once shared, and changes that get made to the document will be visible to any device with access to it.
Files automatically update without the need to hit save every few minutes, so there is no risk of losing unsaved information.
And, because the work is saved to the cloud, it does not take up any space on a hard disk, and there is no risk of losing the work due to equipment failure.
Image Credit: Pxhere.com
Which of these systems is indispensable to your business or do you use all 3?
