With competition in the business world growing stiffer by the day, most companies are on the hunt for proven strategies to increase both productivity and efficiency while still cutting down on their operation costs. One of the most effective ways of achieving this is to fuse the different tools and apps that you use in your business so that you’re operating them from a central point like Piesync.
In this post, we show you how you can easily consolidate tools and apps for key business functions, the factors to consider when fusing them, and the benefits to expect when doing this.
Effective ways to fuse your business apps
Communication
Good communication is essential for boosting the productivity of everyone involved in a business. Without a reliable channel to communicate or exchange ideas, it’s nearly impossible to run a business or company successfully.
Unifying communication channels in your business helps to streamline correspondence between the management, workforce, and clientele. For example, if you use Mailchimp for your email marketing, you can easily fuse it with a handy CRM tool like Salesforce. This merger helps team members track and gather the necessary information from email exchanges any time they need to contact prospects or existing clients.
On the other hand, communication methods like video teleconferencing or popular apps like Skype can be a major time-saver especially if you’re working with remote teams. The good thing is that you can integrate Skype with other popular communication tools like Slack or even VoIP phones, and use them to keep team members in the loop about key milestones or progress in the business.
Customer support
Businesses that thrive and enjoy long-term success today are those that make customer support a core part of their overall business strategy. Indeed, you need to have in place a sound plan for your customer care strategy today including employing technology to help you with tasks like automated chatting and using customer support using tools like Zendesk.
Are you looking for ways to fuse your customer support tools and apps with other existing systems in your business? Below are two great examples of how you can achieve incredible results doing so:
Suppose you’re using Zendesk as your customer ticketing and support tool, it’s possible to integrate it with the majority of popular CRM tools like Hubspot or Salesforce. The biggest benefit you stand to gain from this merger is that you can learn everything you need to know about your customers before jumping on-call or emailing them for business. Additionally, you can learn about the changing preferences and tastes of your existing clients using the data presented to you by your CRM – use this information to ask for feedback or create new products that match the growing needs of your customers.
Customer relationship management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are some of the most valuable software you can add to your business today. These systems help you gather information from nearly all quarters of your business based on your interactions with your staff, contacts, prospects, existing clients, and even suppliers. Their biggest strength however lies in the fact that they allow integrations with most business apps like contact tools, email autoresponders, and social media tools among others.
Take Pipedrive CRM as an example. This software integrates seamlessly with apps like Google Contacts and ActiveCampaign which means you can upload contacts from these tools and conduct successful marketing campaigns based on the available details of these leads.
Factor to consider when fusing business apps
Application data syncing
When merging apps or adding new ones to your portfolio, it is crucial that you sync all the important data of your employees, customers, orders, and prospects from the existing apps to the new ones. Worth noting here is that you need to take extreme caution as a compromise in data integrity or security during this transfer process could have devastating effects on the overall productivity of your team.
Application retirement
After consolidating your business tools and creating a modern app suite, you should retire the old system (legacy apps) to reduce unnecessary expenditure and cut management tasks. Archiving the data in the legacy apps gives you access to any information they might be storing while also letting you get rid of the apps without interrupting your normal business operations.
Transformation capability
When fusing various business tools, it is vital that you restrict your operations to the company’s transformation capacity. Your business’ infrastructure, budget, and the projected timeline of completing the process need to be in alignment if you are to meet your goals of increasing productivity.
Benefits of merging business apps
Consolidating your business tools can help to enhance your productivity in several ways;
Improves decision-making processes
Having a centralized app suite gives you easy access to crucial business data, improved control and management of key business processes, as well as better handling of cross-platform operations. These collectively help you make more informed decisions for your running your business.
Lowers your operation expenses
Fusing various business apps enables you to get rid of redundant systems while also making it easy for you to reallocate assets and reinvest funds to optimize ROI.
Boosts business security
Business app consolidation ensures that there are fewer attack end-points and repeat processes. This translates to lower chances of experiencing common hacking and other security breach attacks.
Enhances your business tax compliance
When all business processes requiring tax compliance are merged into a unified system, you are more likely to address your tax responsibilities more accurately than if the systems were separate. Automation and integration of tax compliance apps into your business take this worry off your head.
Helps to streamline your customer support
Offer more customized customer services and timely responses to customer queries and feedback by consolidating relevant CRM and customer support apps and tools to create a central client data management system.
How are you fusing and integrating apps and tools in your business to boost your productivity? We’d like to hear your feedback