Businesses have turned to communication tools to stimulate employee motivation, find user-friendly solutions, simplify IT management, increase productivity and efficiency, as well as improve customer service. Of course, these are an obvious solution. Communication tools nowadays enable small, medium-sized, and even large companies to achieve their targets on top of the things mentioned above.
Here are business communication tools every organization can get started with today:
Table of Contents
1. Social Intranet Software
What’s a social intranet and why do you need one? It’s the easiest way to have a virtual, interactive community of like-minded people to interact with. With such a network, you can communicate with your employees, customers, and business partners. You can also keep a close watch on your employees as they work and interact with each other in a virtual setting. If you have employees in a certain location or country, it would be difficult to physically supervise them due to their location. However, having a virtual network through social intranet software can be very advantageous for monitoring the progress of your employees.
These days, with the proliferation of social media websites, like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and so on, it’s no longer easy to conduct business without the help of social intranet software. So, having a social intranet will be very helpful to monitor the progress of your employees. It can give reports on the performance of the employees on the different platforms utilized by your business. This way, you can actually see what they’ve accomplished and how they’ve interacted with their customers, clients, and colleagues.
With a social intranet, you won’t have to invest a lot of money in building up an entire infrastructure in which to operate your business. This makes it easier for a business owner to manage their staff. There are many online companies that offer hosting services that are compatible with many popular social intranet software. Such companies usually charge a flat monthly fee, so you don’t need to worry about the technicalities of setting up a social intranet. In fact, most of the companies offering these services can actually get everything set up within one day. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can have your social intranet running and functioning like you want it to be.
2. Auto Dial App
For business owners who want to keep their personal and business lives separate, but still want to use their existing telephone, an auto dial app can help. By automating cold calls from a phone list, an app that functions as an auto dialer increases caller productivity. At the same time, it also protects your private number.
Auto dialers can handle all outbound calls, which helps boost the productivity of your business. It also helps you appear as a bigger business that you actually are to customers and business partners. Note that aside from the mobile app, it’s also possible to use an auto dialer directly from your mobile phone, add auto-dial functionality to your PBX phone system, and as a desktop app.
The best auto dialers have the following features to offer:
- Capable of acting as a single and triple line dialer
- Unlimited outbound and inbound calls
- Unlimited business texts
- Unlimited caller ID’s
- Call tracking
3. Digital Signage
A digital signage is basically a display screen. One can control the content displayed on the screen with the help of remote access or by using other external applications. For example, one can control the content displayed on the screen by using the software provided by the digital signage company to interact with the clients and staff. This can be used for advertisement, promotions, and awareness programs, especially if you want a different way of reaching out to potential customers other than outbound calling using a business dialing platform, like what Call Cowboy offers.
Also, there are various interactive software provided by a digital signage company to attract customers towards your business’s products and services. The software includes a graphical user interface and interactive elements, and you can use them to select the type of campaign that you want to do.
4. Collaboration Tools
Online collaboration tools enable employees to communicate with each other across the globe with just the click of a mouse. These days, it’s vital for companies to leverage this type of change to stay on top of the competition, especially in today’s global marketplace. With a global workforce, businesses need to be able to take advantage of their employees’ collective intelligence by allowing them to communicate quickly and efficiently through an online community. This is where group messaging and private messaging software tools come into play.
Private messaging and group messaging have gained a lot of popularity over the past decade. They’ve become very useful to communicate within the company itself, allowing staff members to collaborate and share information with each other in real time. The primary goal of private messaging and group messaging is to allow workers to exchange information with one another, without having to use an internal chat system. This gives employees the ability to access any information that their team members need to be able to work seamlessly together.
5. Pop-up Notifications Or Alerts
A tool that allows pop-up notifications or alerts in businesses is important to your company because it can help you save a lot of time, money, and a lot of stress. If you’re managing a big business or a big company, this is something that you should look at very carefully.
First off, if you have employees who’ll be working out of the office, then, they’ll need to be notified on regular intervals so that they know what they need to do while they’re out. This is something that can be done automatically so that you don’t need to worry about your employees getting any kind of training on how to handle emergencies or anything else.
The next way that these alerts can work for you is that they can help with communicating with your customers. If your customers need your service and you can’t give it to them, then, you’ll lose a lot of sales and money for your business. However, it wouldn’t be the case if you’re able to give them a heads up before they actually get disappointed.
6. Task Management Software
A task management software helps you organize and simplify the entire process of getting tasks accomplished by your team.
When selecting software for your project management needs, it’s important that you select a product that meets the needs of your company. Note that each program has its own strengths and weaknesses, so you’ll want to make sure you research before making a selection. While most projects go well with any product, some projects need a specific program.
Once you have a plan in place, you can focus your time and energy on tasks and assign them to your team members. Once you’ve completed your assignment, check your tasks to see if they’re actually complete so that you can concentrate on what you should be working on instead of dealing with missed assignments. These are just a few examples of how a project management system can help your business, especially your staff, in getting more things done.
7. Customer Case Tracking Software
The customer case tracking software provides real time and detailed data from all your customers in order to improve your customer service and reduce your costs. This information can be used for future customer support, tracking customer satisfaction, tracking and controlling fraud and abuse, and much more.
Customer case tracking software is a very important tool in the hands of any business. It gives the user instant access to reports and files from all of your customers, allowing you to quickly see which customers are happy and which aren’t. These reports can, then, be used to make changes or improve your customer service. These reports can also be used to better understand your customer’s needs and wants, which will allow you to provide them with the best possible customer support.
8. Video Conferencing Tools
Video communication isn’t a new idea in the business world. In fact, video communication has been around since the very first day it was invented. Since then, there have been several advancements on how this video communication will be made available to the public. Today, video conferences have become much more advanced than ever before. This advancement has helped with getting video teleconferencing done much faster. This means more people can join in a conference without even leaving the comfort of their homes or while on the go.
Video teleconferencing is perfect for seminars, product launches, and business meetings that are run in different places. If you’re going to use video conferencing, you should choose the right type of video communication software.
9. Document Collaboration Tools
A document collaboration tool is a software application designed to allow users to collaborate on a document. The primary purpose of a collaborative document is for individuals to create a single final document through collaboration. Collaborative documents can be text or multimedia files, spreadsheets, presentations, photographs, audio and video, or maps. In some cases, you can have a collaborative application, which is an online document editing program, where you and another person can edit a particular document at the same time.
There are a number of document collaboration tools available today. Some are simple applications, which will let you edit your document online, while others are more advanced, requiring a local computer, Internet connection, and a username and password.
You should make sure that the document collaboration tool you choose has all the features you need. A good document collaboration tool should allow you to collaborate with multiple users from different locations. It should also allow you to edit and send documents from different locations, without losing any changes to either the original or the collaborative version of the document. Other features to look for include: ability to copy and paste the document between locations, the ability to save and restore your document when you want to go back to it later, and the ability to send your document by email or even instant messaging programs.
Document collaboration tools have been around for many years and they’ve become very popular as the need for collaborative technology has increased. Nowadays, documents are being shared electronically far more often than they were just a few decades ago. This has become more prevalent with the introduction of various social networking sites and the use of instant messaging applications.
10. Discussion Forums
The world of discussion forums is one of the most popular mediums for companies. Businessmen are constantly looking for ways to improve their business operations, and the forum is an excellent way to do so. This is because of the fact that you can post whatever you like, and staff and customers can get their questions answered by many people at once. This is a great place to build your business, and you’ll find that it’s also a very valuable tool in attracting more customers.
The first thing that you have to know when making use of the forum is that this is a very interactive platform. You need to make sure that you take advantage of this. If you don’t, then, there’s no point at all in having the forum, as there’s no benefit whatsoever to having forums that are just sitting there doing nothing. Make sure that you take advantage of the different sections of the forum to ensure that people get the answers that they need. If staff and customers want answers about a particular product or service that your business offers, then, you should make sure that they get them here.
Conclusion
When your business is equipped with some, if not all, business communication tools mentioned and discussed above, you can be better positioned in improving knowledge sharing, engagement, and efficiency in the workplace. As a result, you and your entire team can achieve higher productivity levels, thus, improving every aspect of your business operations.
