Reflect, review, and plan.

 

Three little words that belie the work that goes into implementing technology that works for your business today…and tomorrow.  When our businesses are just getting off the ground, we often choose entry-level apps that are free and work well enough. As time goes by and a venture grows,  that single-point app can’t keep up.

That’s when it is time to reflect on what is needed in your organization to enhance the business and the user experience of team members today…and tomorrow. Review what and how those entry-level apps worked to get the job done and what doesn’t work now. This is the basis for planning what you want in the new technology to implement for your organization that will work today and scale for many tomorrows.  This is also a good time to codify processes and systems throughout your company.

 

1. Make a great first impression with automated employee onboarding

 

Did you know that a well-structured onboarding process can make it 58% more likely that your employees will stick around for longer than three years? That’s a great target to aim for, especially since 22% of staff turnover happens within weeks of employment!

Successful employee onboarding can not only streamline all the paperwork that comes with the hiring process, but it can set the tone for what employees should expect of your organization—and what you, in turn, expect of them.

A great onboarding automation system should make it painless for new employees to fill out and sign important forms, like contracts and waivers. But it should also enable you to share important information about your workplace, culture, and expectations in a way that’s polished, thorough, and professional—and makes your new employee feel like a welcome part of your team.

You can actually accomplish all of this without having to resort to multiple apps. Venntive includes a Document tool for handling all your legal documents, including legally binding date- and time-stamped documents. These are automatically attached to the individual’s profile in the CRM. Learning is a complete learning management system for building and administering custom training programs. And, the Wiki lets you build a library of information employees can access to get acclimated to your company and feel at home that much faster.

 

2. Put an end to wasted time by streamlining communication and collaboration

 

If your business depends on multiple individuals or teams working together to make things happen—whether it’s planning a major event or implementing a big project—then you can’t depend on old-fashioned email back-and-forth, especially since better tools are now available.

A great project management system or collaboration tool can streamline group projects and tasks and keep progress from stalling. Collaboration tools help employees break free from never-ending email chains so they can work together simply and effectively in real time.

Robust project management tools can organize everyone’s work in one place so it’s easy to see where things stand at a glance. They can keep track of tasks in progress as well as those that still need to be done—and who’s responsible for doing them.

That’s why Venntive has built our comprehensive Projects app that works for Marketing, Sales, IT, well, your entire company. Build projects, teams, customize the project, and see progress at a glance on the Kanban board. Then, use our Collaborate tool to create custom discussion threads. Planning events? Venntive has you covered for everything from webinars to company outings to annual conferences.

 

3. Make it simpler for customers to pay you—without complicating your life

 

These days there are countless ways for customers to pay you for your products or services—whether it’s by checking out through your online store, paying in person via credit card,  scheduling recurring monthly payments, setting up ACH payments, or even writing an old-fashioned check.

Of course,  you want to meet your customers where they are and accept payments in a way that works best for them—but that doesn’t mean you have to create more work for yourself and your employees.

That’s where Venntive’s automation tools can help. Not only can you create proposals, but you can also issue invoices and accept payments, via Paypal or Authorize.net. You can meet customers’ payment needs flexibly, all in one place where transaction history is automatically a part of their CRM history.. Whether it’s a one-time payment or a monthly subscription, a credit card or an eCheck, an online purchase or a mobile transaction, today it’s essential to have a system that manages the entire payment cycle.

 

4. Book more business with automated appointment and meeting scheduling

 

Your employees may be happy to help customers book an appointment over the phone, but your customers may be even happier if they had the option to do it themselves online.

Simplify life for yourself and your team, and give customers the power to book appointments themselves if they prefer. An online booking system can fill up your calendar while freeing up your team’s time.

There are dozens of scheduling options out there, but they’re single-point solutions. They’re not integrated with your sales and CRM tools. Again, Venntive comes to the rescue! Our appointment scheduling app gives you the power to generate appointments from almost anywhere—your website, your emails, or your social media pages—with an embeddable “Book Now” button. Schedule client meetings and eliminate the back-and-forth and simply get on each others’ calendars. Your lead generation team can even use it while on a phone call, further streamlining appointment scheduling and eliminating lost opportunities when prospects forget to follow through on their own.

 

5. Keep customers engaged with smart automated marketing.

 

If you depend on email to stay in touch with your customers, then automated emails can save you time while keeping customers engaged. There are a variety of services that can help you set up automated email campaigns, including the more popular options like Constant Contact, GetResponse, and MailChimp.

You may already be using a single-point email automation service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or GetResponse for your marketing campaigns. You may even have set up a few email templates to try to streamline  sending those repetitive one-off emails. But that only goes so far. It’s divorced from your sales pipeline and CRM, forcing you to depend on fragile integrations that can lead to losing valuable data and buy signals. Venntive solves that with a smart, easy-to-use  system that lets you leverage the full spectrum of email, as well as mobile messaging to stay responsive to customer needs with customizable templates while also capturing all these actions in the CRM and sharing with others in your organization.

First, check with your employees to see which messages they tend to send over and over again. You may discover that they’re spending far too much time individually confirming a customer’s order or reservation, providing additional product or service information, or answering the same frequently-asked questions, especially if an automated email would work equally as well in those scenarios.

These common, repetitive email tasks can be delegated to email automation. Create a set of customizable templates for company-wide use, develop a small-scale email campaign that is part of a workflow that’s triggered when a customer asks a specific question or makes a specific request. An “if, then” automated campaign, for example, that is part of a larger customer Journey can trigger a series of relevant actions and emailss that reach the customer just when they’re most receptive.

Most importantly, all these actions are captured in one place, creating a complete Customer Lifecycle history that can be easily shared with Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Customer Support

 

6. Save time and eliminate errors with purchase order automation

 

Depending on your business, you may order physical goods from various suppliers or outsource work to a number of service providers. If that’s the case, your operations or finance team most likely spends a lot of time creating, monitoring and processing purchase orders. Unfortunately, for a lot of businesses this is still a manual, error-prone, and inefficient process.

Automation software helps streamline a lot of that repetitive work and gives your employees their time back—time which they can then spend on higher-value business activities.

For example, purchase order and invoice approval software can help your team stay on top of organizational spend, quickly approve purchase orders, and easily keep track of receipts and records for every invoice. With Venntive;s addition of Custom Objects tools earlier this year, you can create a fully customized solution that works for your company.

 

7. Increase accountability with easy, online employee scheduling

 

Why spend hours creating employee schedules when you can use a solution to do it for you in a fraction of the time? You can create templates for schedules that repeat, easily copy a shift, and see employee availability all in one place. Venntive can help you build the perfect work schedule in minutes, a feat that saves you an average of 8 hours per week!

Creating a schedule from scratch takes a lot of time, especially if you’re doing it yourself. And just when you’ve put all of the pieces in place, a random time-off or shift change request can knock everything out of balance and force you to start over.

But if you’re using Venntive tools, whether it’s Projects or Calendar along with the Wiki, those small changes and special requests don’t have to derail everything. You can review and approve requests in real time and send employees instant updates so they know exactly when to show up to work.

Your employees will appreciate being able to access scheduling information from their phones, as well as the ease with which time off requests, vacation schedules,  and other special changes can be accommodated. You appreciate greater employee accountability and a decrease in missed shifts.

The only problem left to solve? How you and everyone in your company spend all those hours you regain each week!

Start exploring all the possibilities today with a 30-day trial account of Venntive! Using that link to set up a trial account by December 31st will get you a 50% on the first 12 months!

Start exploring all the possibilities today with a 30-day trial account of Venntive! Using that link to set up a trial account by December 31st will get you a 50% on the first 12 months!

 

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