4 Reasons to Use InfinCE for Remote Workforce Collaboration

COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more than half of the world population into staying confined within their homes. As social distancing is the only solution available today to prevent the pandemic spread, travel and physical social interactions are at near-zero levels worldwide. For the business world, however, this posed yet another humongous challenge. They had to enable their workforce to shift to a culture of remote working on a massive scale. While several companies have offered flexible work from home options for their staff in the past, this is the first time that such a mandatory remote work culture had to be enforced for almost every single staff.

While the cultural shift was immense, one of the best ways for businesses to keep their staff connected virtually and enable seamless collaboration among them was to use digital enterprise collaboration tools. Video calling became the de-facto mode of employee interactions. But a few weeks into the new culture, there have been serious issues that plagued the digital infrastructure that several businesses relied on.

The widely popular Zoom video conferencing app was used by businesses, educational institutes, government authorities and a whole plethora of other organizations to help their employees and communities stay connected and continue service delivery through remote video conferencing. However, security experts soon revealed that Zoom’s privacy and data integrity claims for its services were not trustworthy. It was found that the app dangerously leaked private confidential and business data of millions of people to other parties such as Facebook as well as being exploited by cybercriminals. Within days, several governments, schools, and thousands of private companies banned the usage of Zoom for their video conferencing needs due to the privacy concerns and dubious data handling policies of Zoom.

So, the challenge for businesses now is to find a replacement for Zoom to manage their remote work collaboration needs. Well, they don’t have to look further than InfinCE, the most trusted digital enterprise platform for small and medium businesses. It facilitates remote work management and safe video conferencing to help businesses continue their operations with remote staff without compromising on security, efficiency, and productivity.

Related Reading: InfinCE Can Help You Quickly Transit to Remote Working

Four reasons why you should try InfinCE for a safe video conferencing and efficient collaboration experience:

1. Secure Video Conferencing

InfinCE offers an integrated enterprise digital video conferencing solution that delivers video calling facilities to employees only on access-controlled shared links. It is exclusively aimed at business organizations and hence prevents leakage of any data or information about callers as in the case of Zoom. Only employees with authorized enterprise credentials can join a virtual video meeting using a meeting URL shared by the host of the meeting or via a secure “peer to peer calling link” between two employees. All video conferencing accesses and permissions are securely logged to prevent misuse or unauthorized access.

2. Interactive Collaboration

When enterprises use multiple apps to maintain a remote work culture like Zoom for video conferencing, G-Suite for communication and productivity tools, Dropbox, or other cloud storage apps for storing files, it creates a huge overhead for employees to manage their work and meetings by switching between these. 

InfinCE offers a unified cloud-based platform that brings together the best of digital conferencing tools like Email, Chats, and secured virtual video meeting rooms for uninterrupted communications. It also combines enterprise management tools like document editors, project management, CRM, etc. for collaboration. All information and data exchange processes and interfaces are secured with information security policies and encryption algorithms for privacy compliance. It enables real-time collaboration between employees seamlessly and in one place.

Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic

3. Safety Firewalls

InfinCE is an enterprise-grade cloud-based platform that has been designed ground up with strict adherence to global standards in security and data encryption. With advanced firewalls, intelligent threat analysis, and multi-level access control permissions, InfinCE ensures that your business data remains confidential during internal transactions and collaboration environments.

4. Smarter Sharing

One of the biggest demands in virtual meeting platforms is the sharing of information, files, and even remote screens for issue fixes and configurations by your IT team. Using less secure tools like Zoom can result in such access controls being exploited by cybercriminals since communication occurs via the internet. With InfinCE, every virtual meeting is encrypted end-to-end and occurs via a secure enterprise calling URL. This prevents external parties from gaining unauthorized access into remote meetings, which was one of the key security threats pointed out with Zoom. Employees can securely share files or even hand over control of their remote screen to concerned departments for configurations and issue management.

As the COVID-19 inflicted lockdown is likely to continue, it is sure that remote working will be a mainstay culture for a long time to come. You need to empower your employees to seamlessly carry out their daily routine from anywhere in the world without having to worry about collaboration problems. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. With uninterrupted video calling, real-time collaboration, and cloud-based subscription, it is the perfect and most cost-effective remote workforce management tool for any business organization. Talk to us to explore the possibilities of InfinCE in your business today.

With the ever-changing market scenario, working effectively from anywhere is merely turning into a necessity more than a luxury. 

Thanks to technology!

Now businesses are able to counter strike even this challenge by switching to remote working environments with the help of remote collaboration tools. Statistics reveal that the number of people working from home has increased by 400% in the last decade. 

But a question remains: 

Although technology and remote team communication tools are making work from home or remote team collaborations possible, how efficient and productive can this work culture be?

For instance:

With the assistance of a remote work tool, your workforce remotely working on a critical project seems absolutely fine, until you encounter a problem that needs an immediate fix, like: 

• You end up struggling between multiple apps to reach the concerned resource
• Raise necessary tickets
• Share important info
• Monitor the task progress

This is crazy:

Multiple work collaboration tools might be enabling you to successfully complete the task, but compromising on time and efficiency is not viable, especially when the market is rough.

So what is it that you need to ensure an efficient remote working environment?

You need the right technology or the apt remote workforce management software!

While working remotely, what’s essential is to ensure enhanced team collaboration and efficient time management. That is where you have to find the right tools for remote teams.

Here’s the deal:

With a remote work tool like InfinCE, you can achieve this by enabling your workforce to get up and get running remotely, within the shortest time and without the need for any special equipment. Eliminating the complexities of using multiple technologies, InfinCE, an integrated infinite cloud facility, makes the best collaboration tool for remote teams.

So, What makes InfinCE the best remote work tool in the market now? 

1. Reduce Technology Complexities with the Right Remote Work Tool

When initiating a remotely functioning workforce, it is obvious to first prepare a list of the must-have work-collaboration tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Spreadsheets and such. 

But it gets worse:

Let’s not ignore that switching between multiple apps has its own difficulties. And it’s a common task you will find in every remote collaboration tools

Check how InfinCE is reducing the complexities of engaging with multiple technologies for better remote team collaboration

• Brings the ease of swift chats
• Efficient video conferencing
• Collaborated worksheets
• Online task managers
• Schedulers
• Secured cloud file sharings

But here’s the kicker: 

InfinCE is providing all of them under one roof. Enabling a much more streamlined and efficient workflow under remote working conditions, thus InfinCE provides the best work collaboration software solution for small businesses.

2. Effective Communication Through an Efficient Remote Work Software

Smooth and effective communication is always the key to better remote team collaboration and a successful business. When it comes to remote working environments, streamlined communication becomes a necessity. Connecting effectively with your team and ensuring that every member is on the same page, might take more than just a few standard emails in most of the remote team communication tools. 

What must be done? 

Before selecting tools for remote teams, companies must ensure it onboard a variety of conversational channels like group chats and video conferencing, to facilitate a smooth and timely flow of information. 

And, here is the best part:

An online cloud platform and a remote team communication tool like InfinCE is dedicated to streamlining work collaborations by: 

•  Providing seamless chat options
•  Enabling your team to join active online meeting rooms through shared links
•  Takes remote work collaboration to a whole new level. 

In addition to it, this remote work tool facilitates efficient screen sharing and makes it possible to create an impact with intuitive and interactive presentations, even while working remotely. The inbuilt calendar feature makes scheduling meetings, updating events and checking member availability a whole lot easier, reducing planning time and enhancing coordination.

Related Reading:5 Workplace Innovations You Can Welcome with Video Conferencing

3. Empower Your Workforce with Right Technology and Remote Collaboration Tool

Let’s face it! 

In today’s rapidly changing environment, it takes a whole set of advanced remote work tools and technologies for small businesses to gain competitive advantage, and survive in the market. When working from home, it often becomes difficult to access many of these required tools, compromising the quality and productivity of work. 

You might be wondering now:

InfinCE is a simple tool for remote teams and a platform built to improve employee efficiency and productivity. With a pool of online apps and remote collaboration tools, InfinCE facilitates seamless creation of online spreadsheets, presentations, and documents, letting multiple collaborators work together in the same document for better remote team collaboration.

The best part is: 

InfinCE enables members to place comments and suggestions in real-time, helps reduce errors and meets deadlines more easily even in remote working conditions. 

Moreover, InfinCE file storage facilitates secured file sharing, guaranteeing complete file security and enabling controlled access and monitoring of how your data is shared. Making InfinCE the best tool for remote workers.

4. Secured Cloud-based File Sharing: Crucial for any Remote Work Tool

Most small companies practice transferring files and data through USB drives or other hardware. Although such practices may feel comfortable and simple to use when working under remote environments, this may turn inconvenient, and in some cases, a huge loss and threat to the company if misplaced, damaged or gotten under the wrong hands.

To avoid such mishaps, it is always safe and effective to rely on the cloud when it comes to transferring and storing files.

Want to know the best part?

InfinCE, the infinite cloud platform, provides effective cloud-based file sharing, allowing employees to seamlessly access and transfer organizational data from anywhere while enabling proper monitoring and activity logins. Thus making it a very secured remote collaboration tool. 

Related Reading: 6 Ways to Build a Secure File Sharing Practice Within Your Organization

5. Complete Access and Control: A Must Feature for Any Best Remote Working Tools

While running a small business with multiple technologies, it takes immense time and effort to manage and administer the effective functioning of each tool. Such management and administration become even more complex and difficult when shifted to a remote working environment. So, any remote work tool has to address this problem. 

We make things simpler for you: 

• InfinCE makes administration simple with centralized intuitive dashboards enabling seamless user management, department creations, and usage tracking, across the organization through our remote work tool. 
• With a single sign-on remote collaboration tool, InfinCE allows employees of a company to access all their business and productivity tools under secured firewalls. 
• With one single remote work platform, a company can gain complete access and control, while least worrying about infrastructure management, storage, backups, security, and updates.

6. Enhanced Productivity & Efficiency: Important for Remote Team Collaboration

In a remote working environment, what’s most important is to have effective resource management. 

Having remote work tools that do not cater to your specific business workflows might leave you spending more time and effort in managing the tool itself, rather than enabling you to achieve an effective workforce or smart servicing environment. 

An integrated remote employee management software like InfinCE gives your company the flexibility to choose only those tools and apps that fit your exact business needs, facilitating easy performance monitoring, and project coordination. 

With advanced tools to assign tasks to remote workers and monitor progress in real-time, InfinCE helps organizations drive remote working efficiency and overall business excellency while contracting the efforts and time utilized for resources management.

A fully remote and flexible “work from home” environment, demands technology to replicate the smooth coordination and functioning of an office work culture. Implementing an integrated remote work tool like InfinCE, makes effective project management, resource monitoring, group collaboration, cloud storage, and other business solutions possible, within the comfort of homes or remote. Along with boosted productivity, InfinCE also ensures a safe, secure and hassle-free IT infrastructure management for the complete organization. In rough market situations, it is critical for small businesses to rely on technologies that are simple to use, cost-saving and initiates enhanced business growth.

To learn more about how InfinCE can help your business work from home effectively, get in touch with our experts today!

Also, check out our infographic to unveil 8 easy tips to effectively work from home!

Focus on these 5 KPIs to improve small business growth

The journey of building a successful small business involves several challenges. You need to understand and measure every step of your growth and this is where Key Performance Indicators or KPIs become a mainstay in your day to day operations. In simple words, KPI can be defined as a collection of checks that helps you understand whether your business is progressing in the right direction by doing the right things.

A large number of small business management or decision-makers find it difficult to understand what KPI’s they need to measure. Studies show that over 50% of small and medium business owners struggle to find even a single KPI that can be used to measure their growth strategy. 

If you are among that half of the entrepreneur population, here is a list of 5 important KPI’s you can start to measure at your small business growth:

Related Reading: How To Build A Highly Productive Remote Workforce

1. Profit per employee

Very often decision-makers face a dilemma in their staffing priorities. The end result is mostly going for wrong hiring in bulk when your business really isn’t mature to afford such an influx of talent. A key KPI that can help you solve this puzzling scenario is to measure the profit each employee contributes to the company in terms of revenue realized. 

If you keep a benchmark value, then hiring targets can be automatically aligned to ensure that profit per employee stays on track with expected profit figures. This profit figure per employee needs to be calculated every month for your first few years in the business to ensure that you can accommodate the growth pace that usually happens in a sporadic manner in the initial days.

2. Revenue per Customer

In the beginning, any customer revenue is appreciable but as you grow, there needs to be a clear direction on who your sales and marketing teams need to focus. For this, you need to arrive at a KPI for revenue per customer. With time, your operations should focus on continuing good relationships with your initial customers but your sales and marketing should be focused on attracting and on-boarding customers having higher revenue potential. For this, a measurement of revenue per customer as a KPI is necessary at all levels.

3. Sales and Marketing Metrics

As a business owner, you feel relaxed when your marketing and sales team ensures that a healthy lead pipeline is in place for future growth. This has to be a key KPI that needs constant checks as it can decide the course of action for almost every operational team in your organization based on the influx of deals from this pipeline.

Related Reading: Becoming Small Business Leaders In 2020: What You Need To Know

4. Time to Market

It is the time you need to bring a product or service to the market so that customers can purchase it. This is a KPI that is needed to ensure that you incorporate customer feedback, market trends and long term vision into your business growth strategies. In the initial days, there will be lesser influence from limited external stakeholders, but as the business grows, you need more inputs and consider more impact areas before launching every new product or service to ensure that you are able to meet stakeholder expectations across every segment.

5. Cash Reserves

At the end of the day, every business’s stability in the market is judged by the financial muscle it displays due to the cash reserve it has at its disposal. As such, it is one of the most important KPI’s you need to keep track of as a business owner. This is a driver behind several departmental operations such as budgeting, recruitment, infrastructure investments and much more. 

Keeping your employees re-assured on their job security as well as your customers on agreed timelines of service or product delivery is possible if you have a clear vision of how cash reserves are growing as a KPI. A negative growth indicates that you need to keep investments on the check and re-imagine your strategies while a positive outlook on this KPI means that you can go ahead and scale your business risk-free.

Key Performance Indicators are a way to ensure your business has the right checks in place for a sustained growth phase irrespective of how the market operates. To successfully measure and track your KPI’s, there is a need for a comprehensive data-driven digital infrastructure that serves each department in your business from Finance to IT to marketing and operations. This is where InfinCE can be the game-changer. Get in touch with us to know more.

How retail marketers can create more dynamic and engaging email content

Email marketing is here to stay, at least for the next decade or so. Statista reports that by 2023 there will be over 4.3 billion active email users globally. Retailers have been using emails as a powerful means to convince shoppers to return for bigger purchases and also to cross-sell based on their customers’ purchasing history. The scenario did not change pretty much when e-commerce started to dominate the retail world.  However, now the challenge that retailers face with their email marketing strategies is to develop interactive and engaging content that can drive conversions from the target audience. So how can you make your retail marketing emails more interactive and engaging?

Here are a few ideas that could help you out:

1. Focus on personalization

Personalization is one of the best ways to bring more engagement in any conversation, be it across any channel and email is no exception. Across the globe, surveys have shown that over 33% of all marketers believe that personalization is the most important capability to have in their customer outreach strategy. By tailoring your marketing email to suit the unique needs and preferences of each recipient, the chances of them trying to glance at your content and further initiate a positive response are high. Leading companies use technology such as big data analytics to gain insights for delivering personalized experiences via email marketing.

Related Reading: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

2. Identify the right audience

While personalization is a great way to connect with customers or potential customers, it is just one side of a coin that will help you. The other is identifying the right audience for an interactive email campaign. Sales or marketing personnel who organize such email campaigns should be able to segregate and create separate lists of target email recipients for each copy based on information from their CRM system. The list may be classified based on several factors such as time zone, preferences, spending budget history, demographics, regional and personal specialty time periods and much more. The better the segregation, the easier it will be the task of content creators to build more personalized email content.

3. Intelligent Cross-Sell

Brands need to make it a point to follow up on customer purchases with cross-selling opportunities. For example, if a person books an air ticket, an email giving the option for them to choose their seat should be sent within a very short time span after the booking for gauging more interest. The email sent for seat selection can either be interactive and allow the user to select the seat from the email itself or it can simply provide a link to a landing page that has an interactive seat map for the user to view and choose accordingly. The key factor here is the near real-time email marketing that will do the trick and land more monetization opportunities for the business.

4. Mobile Friendly

Did you know that 49% of all emails are opened on a smartphone? Hence, irrespective of the content you stuff in an email, it is important to visualize how it will appear in a smartphone display before you shoot out the campaign to recipients. By limiting the scrolls a user has to make and giving them an action item in the first sight, you have more chances of getting them to interact with the email.  Fonts, buttons, and other interactive elements should be designed to be more responsive in smartphone screens and the entire email should be light in size to load completely. Delays would drive away users be it on smartphones or in desktop browsers.

5. Embedding Rich Media

One of the best ways to engage recipients is to include rich media. This could be a visually appealing image or a short video that can be played within the email interface or an interactive survey or poll. A catchy email subject line can bring in more views for the rich media content and if your media are intuitively planned and executed, it will incite more responses from your target audience. Several leading companies use email as their primary mode of gauging feedback from their customers and often publish their survey results or individual feedback (with consent) as a testimony for their offerings. This will improve their loyalty perception in the market and will ultimately lead to more organic sales revenue.

For retail marketers, interactive retail marketing emails will be one of their most critical assets to gain new customers and improve sales. This is one of the key reasons, why your business needs to have a powerful digital platform like INFINCE to handle key operations such as customer relationship and marketing. With intelligent marketing automation and CRM capabilities, INFINCE can empower retail marketers to win more customer hearts with interactive emails. Get in touch with us to know more.

Small Business Success In 2020: Overcoming Challenges

Small businesses and startups have today become a major driver of change across geographies irrespective of the business domain. This paradigm shift has been brought about by a number of factors with technology being the number one among them. With powerful digital tools and channels, small businesses were able to disruptively grab market share from established business houses with lower costs and fewer resources. 

2020 looks to be yet another exciting year for such businesses. But before they reap the benefits, we feel that there are still some challenges small businesses need to overcome to remain competent and successful in 2020. Here are 6 of them explained:

1. Employee Engagement

Your employees are your biggest strength. If they are happy and committed to your customers, then business growth is guaranteed to happen irrespective of the strategy you follow. However, building an engaged workforce is no easy task. Companies must try out innovative and intuitive ways to engage each and every employee in the workforce like creating channels for them to transparently share feedback and opinion, considering their inputs while taking crucial decisions and so on. 

Employees should feel that their voice is recognized and that leadership is approachable. Higher engagement levels are directly related to better productivity and profitability of teams.

Related Reading: Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

2. Planning and Project Management

A business performs at its optimum when every department is organized and works together to achieve a common objective. This happens when proper planning and seamless project management are in place. 

Irrespective of the size of your workforce, project and task planning needs strict emphasis. Insights from such initiatives will be helpful in deciding the future course of action across multiple departments like recruitment, infrastructure, marketing, and sales. There is a need to bring in effortless project management tools to make it easier for companies to plan and schedule their work and meet customer expectations every time.

3. Cyber Security

It is estimated that in every 39 seconds, a cyber-attack or hack occurs globally. As more small businesses embrace the digital bandwagon, the amount of channels where sensitive data is stored or processed has increased monumentally. This means that there are more avenues for cyber threats to occur and every business big or small must address this issue seriously. 

Any breach of sensitive data can lead to damages worth millions as regulatory bodies and authorities across the globe have tightened their grip on user data security. Small businesses must, in particular, be aware of threats lurking in their digital channels and take appropriate measures to avoid any mishaps.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

4. Intuitive Marketing

It doesn’t matter much if you have a great product with mouthwatering features. It must be discoverable for potential customers and this is where marketing becomes a key challenge. Today there are tons of channels where small businesses and startups can showcase their offerings to win business deals. The trick is applying intelligence to identify the correct audience, the best-fit approach, the right content and the most cost-effective propagation technique to reach them. 

From email marketing to social media advertising, there are several areas to explore for today’s businesses. Also using smart marketing automation platforms to understand sentiments of customers is also a very fruitful initiative for identifying the best marketing strategy.

5. Customer Experience

You are required to provide a great experience across any channel that customers interact with. They need faster responses to every query or concern they have and delays are usually punished with negative sentiments on social media. Additionally, there is a need to be aware of trends and interests that can be used to offer personalized experiences to customers. To bring all this in one place, small businesses need to have a Customer Relationship Management or CRM solution that is capable of encapsulating all customer relations in one spot and deliver insights to serve them better every time they reach out to you. A satisfied customer is your biggest marketing tool as their positive sentiments about your brand will bring in more customers through referrals.

6. Talent Management

In addition to employee engagement, there needs to be a powerful and seamless collaboration platform within your organization for managing talent. Right from onboarding to payroll and attendance management to complex records and file management, there is a need for seamless digital transformation within the workplace.

Employees demand flexibility in their work with options such as remote work options, shared collaboration spaces with secure file exchange. If you need to create a workplace for the future, it is important to equip your employees with the digital tools that make their work easier.

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

2020 looks to be an exciting year for small businesses that identify their core strengths and invest in mitigating their core challenges. As customers evolve with dynamic needs, small businesses and startups must bring on-board state of the art digital platforms that can help deliver meaningful experiences to end customers. This is where platforms like InfinCE can be a game-changer. From being the digital backbone of your small business and handling every critical aspect from employee collaboration to customer relationship management, InfinCE can be your success mantra for 2020. Get in touch with us to know more.

How A CRM Helps Drive More Sales For Your Small Business?

“Customer is King” holds true for any business, in spite of what you offer to the market for revenue; be it products or services. But with the immense growth of technology and its salient propagation among businesses, there has been a huge reduction in the gap that existed between large and small businesses when it comes to satisfying customer expectations. 

Through innovation and digital transformation, small businesses have been able to penetrate markets that were controlled by heavyweights by disrupting the entire product or service lifecycles. A major factor in enabling this disruption was customer data and this is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software makes the difference in building a great experience for customers. From managing sensitive information about customers to help sales folks close deals faster, CRM is a vital tool for today’s growing small businesses. 

Related Reading:6 Benefits of Using a Cloud CRM

Here are 5 convincing reasons why small businesses need to invest in a CRM solution today:

1. Identify your Most Suitable Customer

Did you know that 79% of all marketing-generated leads never convert into a sale without a CRM behind the entire operation? This happens when you do not identify and nurture the right prospect. In the absence of a CRM, your sales team will not have access to insights garnered by your marketing team about potential areas of interest of the prospect. This will result in the sales team preparing the best pitch for a wrong target and the entire effort goes down in vain without any result. With a CRM in place, the sales team can get accurate insights about customers who are the best suitable for each sales pitch they have created from the business offerings available.

2. Plan on Building Customer Relationships

It is natural for your sales force to run out of ideas or time while meeting, convincing, and converting prospective leads into rewarding deals. With a CRM application, they can build a relationship with the customer meticulously so that every discussion they have is productive and conversion happens faster. By documenting every interaction in a CRM, the salesperson can use insights from the CRM to approach prospects at the right time with the right context and with the right offering to quickly close the discussion. 

Insights derived from previous customer interactions can be utilized by all members of the sales team as best practices to follow when they meet a new prospect or when taking over the next stage of discussions with a customer who was brought into the nurturing phase by another salesperson.

3. Drive Better Campaigns

Today’s massively popular digital marketing landscape is one way small businesses can catapult their sales considerably. With a CRM platform, it becomes easier to build a data-driven marketing engine around the platform and make better and smarter campaigns to win customer interest. 

A simple example would be using insights from the CRM in an email campaign to boost holiday sales for a small online retail business. The system would give insights such as preferred email reading time, interest and buying patterns of prospects (derived from their past interactions and shopping history also stored in the CRM) and choices in product varieties. These insights can help in closing the sales deal faster with more convincing sales messages and the right timing of email. It may also include targeted promotions such as discounts on special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries.  The small analytical input from the CRM can make a big difference in winning the sales conversion.

4. Improve Up-selling and Cross-selling Capabilities

Once a customer’s journey has been recorded in the CRM, it becomes easy for a small business to use the data to run targeted up-selling and cross-selling promotions. This will also help you to build sustainable long term relationships with valued customers by engaging with them periodically. A committed customer is your biggest marketing asset and by creating a culture of continuous sales engagement with intelligent CRM inputs, this commitment is easily achieved.

5. Better Employee Productivity

With the help of CRM, your sales and marketing teams can make better and smarter decisions with regard to their daily operational schedules. CRM brings in a great deal of automation and frees up time and effort which your employees can utilize for creating better experiences for customers. By empowering them with real-time and intelligent insights about customer behavior, it enables them to achieve their goals and targets seamlessly. It reduced paperwork and research time involved in every customer interaction, thereby paving the way for a smoother customer relationship management experience in every interaction.

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

A CRM is a small business’s best buddy for its marketing and customer outreach initiatives. From building a healthy sales pipeline to helping build fabulous experiences through customer feedback about your products and services, it is a one-stop destination to bring more sales revenue for your business. Successful businesses utilize the CRM capabilities of platforms like INFINCE to drive more value from their customer relationships. Get in touch with us to know how INFINCE’s CRM capabilities can be the right choice for your customer relationship management.

5 Ways To Run A Successful Business With Remote Employees

Gone are the days when a key measure for success in business was the number of hours their employees spent within the four walls of the office. Today, what matters is how well the job gets done irrespective of whether the employee works 8 hours or so inside the office or from anywhere in the world at his or her convenience. 

Flexible and remote working options have become one of the most sought benefits among today’s workforce and at times, people prefer this over higher salary as well. 

In fact, studies have shown that nearly 90% of all employees would love to work remotely at some point in their career either as full time or even part-time when situations demand so. It is the duty of employers to ensure that such flexibility and remote work options are made available for their resources. This will help retain talent and reduce turnaround costs significantly for every position. 

But now comes the question of how to achieve this? Well, here are 5 tips to run your business efficiently with a remote workforce.

1. Grow a Culture of Collaboration

Before going ahead with investing in the tools and infrastructure needed to facilitate remote working for your employees, there is a basic cultural shift needed in your organization. Age-old customs such as micromanaging every single activity of an employee will be a huge roadblock in offering flexible and remote working options. Even though the company may promote it, managers would find ways to forcibly bring employees to the office somehow. 

The first thing to do here is to create a holistic awareness for all employees irrespective of their job roles and seniority. Explain to them the benefits of having a healthy work-life balance, improvements in productivity while working remotely and how to incorporate best practices in remote work. Make remote working a normal routine in your work culture and not a special privilege. This will help improve sentiments of employees and avoid biased favors and other negative impressions that may arise in your core employee vision.

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

2. Empower the Workforce with Technology

One of the biggest issues that companies face while offering remote work options is access and connectivity for remote employees to the core office environment. This is where technology can be a lifesaver. From offering secure connectivity to internal office networks and file storage archives to empowering teamwork in real-time using virtual workspaces, the options are limitless. 

There are powerful cloud-based platforms that facilitate real-time communication and collaboration on work tasks. Employees can access and work together in these virtual workspaces from anywhere in the world and securely exchange confidential files and information. They can stay connected with the events happening in the office through intranets that have social media-inspired interfaces for engaging interactions. Such platforms enable transparent sharing of workloads and ensure that everyone is aware of how their work can impact the service delivery of the whole team.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

3. Encourage Autonomous Decision Making

Today, businesses must seek to inculcate leadership quality in employees and for this to happen, the first thing to do is allow employees to work autonomously with minimal supervision. 

Using technology solutions, it is possible to easily measure the value they are contributing autonomously and how well their defined job responsibilities are managed. Hence, there is minimal need for manual supervision and employees can be trained to make decisions on critical scenarios that have a direct impact on customer experience. This is yet another step to encourage a responsible remote work culture. 

When remote working employees have a clear understanding of how their decisions and pace of work can impact overall business objectives, they leave very little room for errors and mistakes. This will greatly improve team dynamics and also set the tone for a highly productive remote work culture.

4. Dedicated Communication

Communication is a key pillar in empowering the workforce of any kind within an organization. When you want to have a successful business with remote working employees, then communication becomes even more important. All employees working from anywhere in the world need to have constant sync with their peers in the office and have an idea of what is happening in the organization or within their teams. 

In addition to standard email communication, companies must on-board a wide variety of engaging conversational channels for employees to stay connected with the organization. It could be periodic newsletters having company-wide information, instant messengers for people to converse with each other or in groups as part of team projects or it could even be a fully-fledged intranet. Irrespective of the channel you choose to implement, the core purpose of communication here is to make employees aware of what happens in the organization, what is to be expected as return from their job roles and how their performance drives value for end customers.

5. Measure Results and Provide Feedback

Offering flexible remote working policies is one side of making a successful workforce environment. You need to ensure that such policies and flexibility do not come at the cost of missed business output. Here is where ample measurement of performance and productivity needs to be maintained. Through modern project management tools, it is easy for managers to assign responsibilities and tasks to remote employees and monitor the progress through periodic sessions. These sessions may be a video or audio conferencing and don’t require the person to be physically present in the office. These sessions can also be used to identify roadblocks and challenges that remote employees face and provide them with support and advisory needed to tackle them easily.

As more and more companies shift their work culture to a flexible and fully remote operational model, you need to be looking at ways to replicate it to remain competitive. This is where platforms like INFINCE can be the game-changer in facilitating the best environment for remote teams. From collaboration tools to powerful project management and cloud storage, our range of solutions empowers your workforce to drive more value every day from the comfort of their homes. Get in touch with us to know more.

Tips For SMBs To Boost Growth With Increased Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is today considered to be the responsibility of an organization as a whole. Earlier, it was merely seen as a focus area of the HR department and several small companies did not have a clear vision about employee engagement and how it can impact their growth. All they did was organize a few monthly fun activities in the office and expected employees to be motivated on their own to return to work every day from their homes. But times have changed and studies have shown that teams with greater engagement levels show profitability levels 21% higher than the rest. 

Your small business, irrespective of the domain in which you operate, should include workforce engagement as one of the key pillars of growth. Only when your employees show dedication and passion to contribute to building valuable experiences for your customers, will your business achieve desired levels of growth. If you are still wondering how, here are 5 ways in which employee engagement can instill more growth for your small business enterprise:

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

1. Better Research

As a start-up or small business, every aspect of your operation is critical. People handling each department needs to be aware of the fundamental rules in building great customer experiences through their individual focus areas. 

In a small business, there may not be many avenues where employees can be offered training sessions on improving and incorporating best practices in their individual roles. They need to take up research and learning exercises to improve their competence on their own. To do so, they need motivation and this is exactly what employee engagement initiatives can bring to the table. When employees are engaged, they will feel energized to try out new innovations in their field of operation. They will research it, find out best practices and seamlessly drive value from implementing the practice in their daily routine.

2. Ownership and Responsibility

Startups and smaller businesses often face the challenge of meeting bigger expectations with fewer resources. As such, the workforce in such scenarios will have to be autonomous to a great extent. They need to make decisions on assigned tasks with authority and in most cases without supervisory monitoring. For this to happen, employees need to be empowered enough to take ownership of the tasks assigned to them. 

Each component of your business should be run by the respective employee as if it were their own business unit. Such a high level of commitment and sense of ownership comes only if people are recognized and engaged at work. When they have seamless work experience along with the right enablers to help finish their jobs faster and with more efficiency, employees will demonstrate ownership of their activities at a bigger scale. This will positively influence the way customer service is delivered through your business channels leading to better revenue potential in the long run.

Related Reading: Top Technology Challenges Faced By Small Businesses

3. Talent Retention

Studies show that in the United States alone, the cost of losing an employee is above 15,000 dollars. This is the turnover cost incurred for replacing them with a similarly skilled worker. As a small business owner, hiring and retaining the right talent is often a tricky perspective considering the fact that the options available for a potential candidate are numerous. If you have found a good talent, then it is best to retain them and use their skills to nurture your business. Here is where employee engagement can add to the retention experience. 

By enabling a comfortable working environment with autonomous decision-making freedom, you can empower workers to explore their talents in all possible ways. Benefits such as healthy work-life balance, recognition of work done and seamless career progression options can improve engagement levels of employees. This will, in turn, make them stay with you for a longer period thereby saving you from bearing a huge talent replacement cost in the long run.

4. Boost Profitability through Increase in Productivity

When employees are engaged, they perform better and with more efficiency leading to higher results and productivity levels in the organization. Global consulting firm Wyatt Watson reports that companies that paid attention to employee engagement initiatives were able to generate 26% higher revenue per employee. 

This increase in productivity will reflect in your business growth as well. When more value can be contributed by each employee, the overall profitability of the business scales up. This is a win-win situation for everyone.

5. Improved Collaboration

In every workspace, irrespective of the team size, one of the biggest drivers of growth is team bonding. “Unity is Strength” is a motto that every business must incorporate in its work culture. By bringing on-board powerful employee engagement platforms that enable seamless collaboration between your employees, small business players can drive better results through teamwork. Modern technology solutions like InfinCE enable team members working from anywhere in the world to organize meetings, share files, work on a project together over virtual workspaces thereby enabling faster fulfillment of customer service. 

When everyone in the team is engaged, they will be willing to help each other with individual tasks and go the extra mile to support colleagues who may be facing challenges. This generous effort of teamwork will reflect positively in the brand value your small business propagates to the outside world.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

Workplace engagement is a key driver of growth in today’s highly competitive market for small businesses. Entrepreneurs need to have a dedicated vision to improve engagement levels within the company and enable a better working environment for each employee. Here is where cloud-based platforms like InfinCE can be the game-changer for your organization.

From creating powerful intranets that enable enterprise-wide communication and collaboration to file sharing, InfinCE can help drive an engaging culture in your organization. Get in touch with us to explore how to keep your employees happy, engaged and motivated to come back to work every day.

Why Small Businesses Need to Invest in SaaS Delivery Model

The widespread adoption of Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model of technology deployment is undoubtedly a key driver of digital disruption across industries. Studies show that the global SaaS market is expected to touch or exceed a staggering USD 623 billion by 2023. And the biggest beneficiary of SaaS across every industrial sector is small and medium businesses operating in these sectors.

While big players do have their own key advantages, it is the smaller players who can truly transform their business. With SaaS, they get access to powerful tools that can enable them to compete with the best in the business without worrying about costs. With SaaS, they only need to pay for the resources they use, can scale up or down depending on business needs and enjoy hassle-free technology deployment without dedicated monitoring staff. This allows them to offer the best of services to customers using the same digital solutions as used by leaders in their industry.

Still skeptical about making the SaaS switch? Here are 5 reasons to transition your small businesses digital infrastructure into a SaaS model:

Related Reading: Private Or Public Cloud: Where Should My Business Invest?

1.Save on Costs

As a small business, you need considerable investment in core business processes and resources like for example, inventory for a retail business. There isn’t too much scope for spending heavily on IT projects if your core business is not technology related. But you need the best of digital solutions to serve the savvy and demanding consumers of today. Here is where SaaS-based software can be your best friend.

SaaS solutions typically work on a subscription basis, where you pay for what you consume: be it storage, computing power or number of users. And most cloud software is available for ready deployment with easy customization to suit your unique needs. This enables small business players to use world-class software without worrying about hefty license fees and implementation costs.

2.Flexible Infrastructure

By infrastructure, we mean the technology back-end of SaaS solutions that can accommodate any fluctuations in usage patterns. For example, a retailer may see increased use of technology services during peak holiday seasons. This scenario may require extra storage space or computing power to process transactions faster and deliver constantly seamless customer experiences. If you were to have an IT infrastructure on-premises, then jacking it up to meet the extra demand would involve a Herculean effort. Not to mention, the cost overhead for extra capacity, which may find a use for only a few days or months every year.

In a SaaS model, small business owners need not worry about scaling their technology infrastructure in pace with the demand from consumers. SaaS providers offer easy scalability and managed services to ensure that your technology rises up to the occasion when it’s needed. This flexibility empowers small businesses to focus on improving their business processes while trusting their infrastructure to run on its own risk-free.

Related Reading: Why Should Your Business Invest in Cloud Native Digital Technology?

3.Access to Innovations

Today, every successful business, across any industry relies on powerful technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics and so on to serve customers better. As a small business, you may not have the financial muscle or technical skill to build and use such technology in your daily operations.

However, with SaaS solutions, the story is completely different. SaaS vendors continue to invest heavily on incorporating market innovations such as AI, machine learning, etc., to enable their solutions to deliver more value. When you subscribe to their solutions, your business stands to automatically benefit from using this technology from day one.

4.Zero Maintenance Effort and Cost

Unless your small business opts for a private cloud infrastructure hosted on your own servers, you are less likely to incur any costs of maintaining your SaaS solutions. There is no need for dedicated staff to monitor availability or conduct periodic maintenance of hardware. All these would be managed by the SaaS vendor themselves and you only have to pay for the subscription plan you opted. This can be extremely useful for small players as they can control IT costs significantly and channel their savings into their core business.

Usually, all SaaS vendors commit to near 100% availability for their services and for cases of technical downtime, they usually notify customers well in advance to be prepared for any disruptions. Not having to hire technology professionals to run these solutions enables you to recruit more talent having niche business skills to grow your business.

5.Faster Deployment

SaaS software usually goes live in a matter of minutes for small businesses that have no or minimal customization requirements. Once up, any incremental changes or new feature additions can be rolled out without causing any disruption to the customer’s business processes that rely on these solutions. Vendors can roll out these updates at any convenient time without having to disrupt the customer’s business operations and without having to involve stakeholders from the customer’s side for every deployment. As a business owner, you can sit back and relax while new features get added seamlessly to your digital solutions faster and with more robustness.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One-Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

SaaS is the future of small business technology as evident from the high rate of adoption it has found globally. The large plethora of benefits that customers get to enjoy while subscribing to powerful SaaS solutions with significantly low investments on cost and effort is a key driver of this adoption trend.

All you need is a strategic technology partner to enable the best value from your SaaS investments by offering you a powerful solution and tailoring it to suit your unique business needs. This is where INFINCE can be the game changer in your journey. Get in touch with us to know how your small business can leverage the power of SaaS with INFINCE. 

Top Must Watch Trends in Enterprise Video Conferencing

In an office environment, a meeting is scheduled often to not just communicate information, but as a means to establish, nurture and prosper relationships- both new and existing- between all involved stakeholders. This calls for a better solution for conferencing than conventional telephone and audio conferencing solutions. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay in today’s dynamic workspaces where technology facilitates remote working from anywhere in the world. The added benefit of sourcing talent from across the globe for your unique needs and not having to spend on physical infrastructure to accommodate them is a boon, especially for small and medium enterprises. Video conferencing offers far higher levels of engagement and collaboration opportunities when compared to other employee communication channels. So what will video conferencing enable for your workforce today?

Here are 5 trends in the workplace that find seamless adaptability with the aid of video conferencing.

1.Accountable Remote Workforce

As mentioned initially, today the large millennial population in the workforce has made the demand for remote work options quite high. Employees want to work out of their own comfort with more freedom than a typical office environment. As for employers, they are left with no option but to allow this flexibility for hiring the best talent to enable their growth. This is precisely the area where video conferencing can bring in the most impact. Today, successful organizations manage their remote workforce efficiently through video conferencing.

Team meetings and presentations involve live video streams from every employee location to ensure that all team members are present and aware of their roles and responsibilities. This is the next best thing to having everyone in a single room and sharing their responsibilities in front of the large group. So the video collaboration platform that is deployed across your enterprise requires a transparent login and access control policy that will ensure participant interactions are tracked and logged for future reference.

2.Smaller and Smarter Meeting Rooms

When you have fewer employees in the office and more on a remote basis, the need for physical meeting spaces diminishes inside the office. However, meeting rooms need to have, smarter equipment to ensure that team meetings conducted over video conferencing can be efficiently executed. Proper projection screens or televisions, audio, lighting and camera infrastructure that is able to vividly capture and present video streams for everyone involved in the meeting are an absolute necessity.

For remote working staff, they need a simpler solution like a mobile app which allows them to easily join the video conferencing stream and share information with their peers. While choosing your video collaboration platform, ensure that it offers all these levels of flexibility that will enable all stakeholders to seamlessly engage in video conversations.

Related Read: Why should a small business opt for INFINCE?

3.Content Sharing Platforms

In addition to enabling every team member to see each other, video conferencing platforms need to provide the ability to share files and other content in accordance with better compression and security policies to ensure lower bandwidth consumption and safer data transmission. This is vital for remotely working employees as they often have to collaborate with their peers in office for reviews and clarifications on their work in progress which may be files, documents, etc.

Your video conferencing solution needs to take into account the desired storage and streaming requirements for file sharing as well as the capability of doing so from even a mobile app. With flexible content sharing ability, employees will be empowered to work better from anywhere as they already have an efficient video communication channel which is also a powerful collaboration system as well.

4.Cloud-Enabled Video Conferencing

For small and medium businesses to remain competitive and cost-efficient in the market, they need to have flexible spending and management ability for their IT infrastructure. Video conferencing being a part of this infrastructure needs to follow a similar trend as well. This is why enterprises need to focus on cloud-based video conferencing solutions like INFINCE that offer easy scalability and better cost efficiency when they need to dynamically scale up or down their usage patterns over time. Additionally, adding new capabilities to your video communication and collaboration infrastructure is easier when it is cloud-based and depending on your needs, the most appropriate pricing plan can be easily configured.

5.Unified Communications

If your core business is not technology, then having to manage a host of solutions for team management and communication like video conferencing, audio conferencing and other intra-organizational collaboration will be a difficult activity requiring considerable workforce effort. This is where unified communication platforms make a difference.

They allow employees to easily switch between communication and collaboration channels on the go depending on their convenience. This will certainly improve productivity as employees are not forced to shuttle between various apps during a conversation. Enhanced collaboration would also enable teams to quickly arrive at decisions and enable work to be done collectively and within stipulated timelines.

Video conferencing is an irreplaceable communication channel for today’s organizations if they aim to build a robust and reliable work culture both in-house and with their extended remote peers. It will be best to have a scalable and cost-efficient technology backbone in your organization that will offer solutions for management, video conferencing and integrated employee collaboration all the same place.

By seamlessly, enabling businesses to build their technology infrastructure on the cloud, INFINCE is the right choice for a better workplace in your business. From providing powerful collaboration and IT deployment options in the cloud to facilitating highly engaging video-enabled collaboration, INFINCE can be your businesses best bet for digital transformation. Talk to our experts to know how your business can utilize the power of INFINCE.