in conjunction with
YourHerefordshire.co.uk
in conjunction with
YourHerefordshire.co.uk
Today, as we stare a 2nd wave in the face, all businesses are reviewing their working practices to mitigate the risk of future lockdowns in the wake of recent tightening of Government advice regarding Covid-19
Over the next few weeks, Credible Systems, with the help of Your Herefordshires #SupportLocal scheme, will be sharing some tips for reducing the impact of Covid on your small business.
The uncertainty of the last 6 months and the likelihood of possibly another 12 months disruption to business means that your response to the Covid crisis is more important than ever.
We’ll be looking at websites, your potential new customers first stop when looking at your business and also at some software tools that will help you work more efficiently in this ‘New Normal’
If your business is still able to provide services or products despite a lockdown then you are among the fortunate. Highest amongst your concerns will probably be the following: (These are quicklinks to content below)
A detailed breakdown of how this can be acheived is beyond the scope of this article, and is frankly different for every business, but hopefully you will see how achievable it is.
The focus will be on modern digital technologies and how they can help as opposed to how they work. No dry lectures here.
Obviously, when the guidelines require it your staff and yourself should work from home if at all possible. The Zoho Suite of tools provides a number of point solutions (single applications) and suites of tools to do just this. In fact Zoho themselves migrated all 8000 of their workforce to remote worker status in just 3 days.
Here are a few examples, there are many more.
All of these tools are designed to work together or alone. So, for example, from within CRM whilst checking on the status of a client or a deal you can initiate a chat with your sales manager about the deal or invite the client to a web meeting with a single click.
Being a cloud based suite of tools with no installation required, ALL Zoho apps are suitable for working from home or on the go. Many come with a companion app for Andriod or iOS.
A major step towards running your business efficently is to ensure that you have a single point of control for all your leads and customer information. This is what is called a Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM.
When your prospect information (leads) and existing customer information (Clients/Accounts) are managed securely and centrally they can provide a single point of truth about that entity across many other parts of your business.
If a client or supplier changes address for instance, why would you want to update that address in your contacts, finance, reporting, marketing and stock control systems? With Zoho CRM as your Single Point of Truth you can update once and share that change across the entire ecosystem of applications.
This integration runs through the heart of the Zoho Suite...
As does the automation of specific workflow tasks,
e.g. emailing new prospects gathered at a trade show.
Web forms allow you to collect accurate prospect and customer information with consent. This can be added directly to CRM. The authorisation of new records can be a requirement.
An expanding area of data collection. Be aware of who is hittimng your website, allow them to chat with a bot or with a human representative. Collected details are reviewed and added to CRM.
Add Prospects and Customer details directly from your email client, saving copy/paste and reducing errors.
Add existing customer detail from spreadsheets and databases directly into CRM vai their guided import procedure.
Our experience is that this process, while invaluable, will make you ask questions about your data you may not have considered before.
Already use a CRM system that you are unsatified with? Zoho will help you migrate this datafor free!