Tech tools can make all the difference if you know what to use and when. New tools appear every year, and older ones get upgraded constantly. This list includes all of the hottest tech tools of 2016, whether they are well-known tools that just keep getting better and better, or tools that have started to pose some serious competition.
Employee Portals
When it comes to tech tools that can improve your business’ efficiency, employee platforms don’t really show up very often. Which is a shame, because they can be an incredibly simple and efficient solution to solving in-house communication. They are an absolute must for large companies with a lot of different departments. The swalife guide is a good example of all the features you can benefit from when using employee portals to manage and inform your employees about important work information.
Medium sized companies can also benefit from using these tools, especially if they allow remote work. Your HR department will certainly appreciate these tools, as it will make their work that much easier.
Team Communication Tools
Company-wide communication is one thing, but you also have to deal with team communication within the company. For this, you need a different specialized tool. The most popular team management tools are Trello and Asana, but recently Wunderlist has emerged as a strong alternative option. It tends to run faster than Trello or Asana. All three tools have a free version, ideal for smaller projects, with fewer team members. However, the premium investments are well-worth the cost when you’re working with more than 20 people.
Customer Care
Once you’ve solved the issue of internal communication, both at the level of the company and at the level of each individual team, you need to focus on external communication. The customer care department is perhaps one of your most important teams. Because they come in direct contact with the customer.
Customer care can make the difference between a business’ success or failure. Every company will run into a few problems with their clients. What matters is how you deal with these problems and how you handle your clients’ complaints. Customer service reps already have a difficult job, so you can make their lives easier by giving them proper customer care tool
The most well-known one is Zendesk, which remains a top-notch option. However, for those of you who are interested in an alternative customer care tool, Freshdesk is emerging as one of the top competitors.
Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are valuable customer engagement tools in and of themselves. But simply creating an online presence is not going to help unless you know what the results are and you have proper social media management tools.
To get the most out of your brand’s online presence you need a tool that can help you analyze users’ interaction with your brand and prepare powerful social media campaigns. Hootsuite or Buffer can be just the thing you need.Using these tools, you can manage all your accounts from one single place.
Cloud Storage
One of the most important, and often overlooked business tools you need to have is a place to store all your data. Cloud storage is quickly becoming the norm, replacing on site archives that are often difficult to navigate through and constantly at risk of getting corrupted or just misplaced. Cloud storage allows you to keep everything in one place.
Dropbox remains one of the best choices. It’s easy to understand and most are familiar with it. Businesses should consider investing in the Pro version as soon as possible, as the free one allows only 2GB of information to be stored, thus it’s going to fill up quite quickly.
Google Drive can be an even better option for companies that use Gmail for their work-related emails, as it provides a smoother integration with Google Apps. Because it is fully integrated with the apps, Google Drive can also easily double as an organization tool.
There is also the modestly titled Box app, that provides similar services. It too can work as a collaboration tool, not just a cloud storage device. And it can be optimized to suit the needs of specific company departments, unlike Dropbox and Google Drive, which tend to focus more on non-work related use.
Hopefully these tools are will help you develop your business and increase productivity, whether you are freelancer who’s trying to stay on top of things, an up and coming entrepreneur or a seasoned manager.
