Entry Software Corporation

Entry

Archives for December 2017

How to Apply Emphasis on Customer Engagement

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Living in a fast-paced 21st-century society can be overwhelming. Customers are constantly wanting new and improved products or services. Since our society is so fast-paced, we move quickly but we also get bored quickly. We want to experience bigger and better things. We get tired of the same old and desire change. From a company standpoint, this can be very difficult to deal with, especially when customers are constantly coming and going. As a company, you want to keep your customers loyal and engaged to the best of your abilities. Here’s how!

Build An Online Community

A community will allow customers and clients to feel like they’re appreciated and heard. It will give clients the ability to ask questions and give feedback about your business. If you’re customers have appropriate assistance that they’re satisfied with, they’ll be sure to remain engaged with your product or service. A community also allow your customers to have discussions with one another that is relevant to your industry. Many popular social media websites such as Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups and Google+ allow for the creation of communities. This is beneficial to you because many users are already on these social media networks, which makes it that much easier for you to make them part of your community.

Develop Emotional Connections

Once companies do this, there is a much greater chance a customer will stay loyal to you. Think about it this way, you purchase a company’s product or service. However, there’s no name or face attached to the company, just an anonymous source that you’re giving your money to. There is no personal connection with that interaction. Without a personal connection, a customer won’t feel as engaged as they would be if they put a face to the name. Most of the time, customers want to see who they’re dealing with, which allows for better engagement. Here’s how to build personal connections with customers,

  • Use images of your team members on social media- If your customers have a question about your product or service and they post this question to a social media page, having a team member with a profile picture of themselves is much more personal rather than having a photo of the companies brand name. The customer will most likely feel as if they are speaking to an actual person rather than a robot.
  • Introduce yourself- An introduction is the best way to grab a customers attention. For example, it can be as simple as reaching out to them when they give you a follow. Such as, “Hi (name)! Thanks for the follow! If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us.” This is a personalized message that will stand out more to the customer.
  • Include biographies of the CEO and major employees- This allows your customers to develop an emotional connection because they can read about employees and make connections to similar lifestyles.

Host An Event

By hosting an event, you’re giving your customers a chance to meet you and your employees in person. It’s also a great way for your customers to interact with each other. This will further enhance the sense of community, therefore making the customers more engaged. An alternative to this is rather than hosting your own event, you can set up a booth for your company at a local trade show. This way, you can showcase your product or service while getting to meet your customers.

Keep Up With Conversations

Remaining in consistent conversation with customers is a successful approach that will leave your customers feeling appreciated and engaged. When questions and complications arise, you and your team need to remain consistent with addressing problems as soon as they are brought to your attention. This allows your customers to remain loyal to you because they will be reassured that whenever they have a question, they can always get an answer.

Conclusion

Although these concepts require a great amount of work to maintain, it is extremely beneficial to your company to have these connections with your clients or customers. Keeping them engaged will allow you to have more security knowing that your customers will be loyal to your product or service.

How Help Desks Make Your Customers Happy

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Imagine you’re talking to someone and in a flash, a crowd of people approach you asking all sorts of questions all at once. It’s pretty overwhelming. Now think about websites, when they reach “over capacity,” it too feels overwhelming. This can be an ongoing issue that companies may be going through. Not only is it overwhelming on the receiving side, but also frustrating to the customers when they’re not getting a response. It leaves no one happy. A great and quick solution can be with an online help desk support to keep your customers happy!

Online Help Desk Support

Online help desk support can accomplish many tasks at once, some include: assisting with troubleshoots, answering questions and solving common problems. The software works towards organizing all the questions and issues that may come up, in a nice organized list; making it much easier to manage and assess problems or questions. This not only allows for an easier and more logical way to resolve problems but also lets the company see the type of questions arising from customers. They can now assign the common issues to the most effective department. Another asset help desks bring, is it can instantly assign problems to certain employees to answer immediately. This can help spread out the work amongst employees, instead of piling all the work on one. With this, the right employee can answer the questions effectively, which satisfies the customer.

When browsing through a new website many customers usually conclude to similar questions. Instead of having an inbox full of the same questions, your help desk can allow instant responses to customer’s simple and common questions. This can reduce the demand for answering frequently asked questions; also providing the customer with a quick and easy answer. Now, there are always customers who have unique questions that can’t simply be explained with a quick answer. With a help desk, after the customer submits the question the software will organize and notify the employee assigned to the certain field that question falls under. This allowing proper analysis with the right person, giving the customer the best answer.

Appointing people with tasks and problems can generate an efficient workplace. With a help desk, it also provides a list of all the assigned problems that need to be completed. Managers can decide what tasks need to be done, evenly distributing them so they can be completed in a reasonable time frame. All the questions and issues that may arise can be organized nicely into a list, so employees can see what needs to be done and the common questions asked. Working with help desk provides a positive relationship between employees and customers. To add, being able to instantly answer questions to customers will make them very happy because they can get a quick response and continue browsing through the website. A help desk software allows quick and thought out solutions to customers who have questions regarding a business. This will open up an accessible and easy-access website to your customers!

2 Key Principles For Productivity

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Being productive can be challenging, even for the hardest working and most relentless of employees. The focus, determination, and resourcefulness that one needs in order to be productive require a lot from a person, that can sometimes be challenging to achieve. Being productive 24/7 can be categorized as an art, but for employers, it is an asset. So what are 2 key principles for productivity?

The term “productivity” can be defined as ‘the state or quality of producing something and how effective the effort by an individual, population or community is.’ This means that although you have various tasks or projects that are currently ‘in the works,’ making sure that each one is of quality and produced efficiently is still as important as how much you achieve during your day. Overall, productivity can be defined by two very different things:

1. How much you completed during your day.

or

2. How effective you were during your day. Getting The Most Done In The Shortest Amount Of Time

Getting Rid of Interruptions

Working hard during your busy day can sometimes be impossible. The biggest distraction, now at work, is your colleagues around you asking questions or gossiping about the latest episode of Stranger Things and social media. This can be a huge issue for you as they are, directly and indirectly, cutting off your focus to get the day’s tasks completed quickly and effectively. How do you solve this? Isolation, and some good music. Moving into an area that is quieter, a less trafficked area, and more productive, can help you focus on what lies ahead of you. In addition, a good playlist of music is another key thing to have with you as it allows you to ‘zone out’ the people around you and focus.

Working Through Projects…FAST

Another thing that can be troublesome is the lack of motivation or desire to complete a project because of how large, complex or lengthy it is. Fortunately, there are ways of working through your projects quickly without losing your moral. One effective way is to keep your current activity tasks to a minimum and focusing on each specific task on its own. This will allow you to finish your projects faster and at a higher quality, which will ultimately impress your peers and (more importantly) your boss.

Timing Matters

Throughout your day you may have multiple meetings, events or functions that require your input and this in itself can stop productivity in its tracks. To work around this, while keeping deadlines and making sure projects are in check, there are a few ways to get things done without missing anything. One way is to formally block sections out in your calendar for work time. This gives you the time you require to get work done and ensures that you won’t be disturbed by your peers for a set amount of time.

In addition to this, you can also keep the number of meetings you take to a minimum or keep designated time for meetings with colleagues in advance. This does two things. One, it allows you to make sure that meeting time is used for important items or discussions and two, it allows you to ensure that your time won’t be wasted during the day.

Making Sure Your Assignments Get Done

Utilizing Software Applications

Using project management, time tracking, or scheduling software can make all the difference when it comes to planning tasks in advance and ensuring they are delivered on time. Not only does this allow you to stay on track and see your progress from start to end, but it also lets you collaborate with other team members involved in the project when necessary.

Setting Task Deadlines

Creating task deadlines for smaller items within projects ensures that you know when things need to be completed, allowing you to track your progress. Today, work management software allows you to understand when specific tasks need to be finished, what resources are required and who is responsible for completing them. The ability to view, in real time, what is going on gives you the added benefit of understanding if you’re behind, on track or ahead of schedule.

Action Time: How To Productively Stay On Task

The best way to commit to your projects and ensure that you stay productive is by keeping a digital or paper ledger of your tasks. This will help you to understand quickly if you’re on track to success, allowing you to make sure that your customers and co-workers are happy with the work you’re completing. Overall, the biggest thing to understand is that you must keep a record of where you are in a specific project, as at the end of the day, if you don’t know where you stand you will lose productivity quickly.

Remember, productivity can mean how much you finish in a day, but we also fail to remember that it too means how effective we are amongst our peers. So, even if you don’t get everything done you set out to do for the day, the quality and the effectiveness of your work is what’s important.

Strategic Leadership: Easy Ways Be A Better Manager

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All good companies are run by good leaders who understand the needs of their colleagues and can act on those needs, thus be a better manager. However, great companies who have strategic leaders at their core know when and where to serve the needs of their team and how to do so in the most efficient way. This can all be achieved by doing one thing, listening. As your business grows you lose the ability to offer your employees one-on-one time to work with one another and discuss developments over the last few days, weeks or maybe even months. It is because of this that as your organization grows and matures, your employees, especially at the bottom of the ‘food chain’ lose the ability to communicate effectively with their superiors.

The lack of communication amongst management and staff can mean many things for your business. This could include, lost creativity, additional money because of duplicated tasks or projects, and poor employee satisfaction among other things. Therefore, it is critical to empowering yourself as a manager to give your staff, no matter their duties or maturity within the company the opportunity to talk with you about what is going on.

Listening 101

Regardless of what industry you’re working in, every employee wants to know that their boss genuinely cares about them and is willing to invest time and resources into their success. To be an active listener, there are three things that must occur to reach your maximum potential.

1. Create Open Time For Employees To Meet With You

This allows your staff to be welcomed into the conversation and be able to express their interests more comfortably, ideas and inputs on tasks, projects, and day-to-day operations. Also, this allows you to anticipate the needs of your staff better should anything urgent in your schedule suddenly arise.

2. Take Notes or Build Off Of Staff Discussion

Discussing with your team is a start, but if you don’t allow yourself to make anything of it, you’re wasting everyone’s time. Anticipating to take notes or address discussion points directly is critical should you want both parties to take value away from your discussions.

3. Follow Up, follow up, …

Continuing the conversation with workers not only tells them that you care about their interests but also allows you to keep track of initiatives that you may put into motion on a personal level with your team members. For example, if one of your employees suggests a new customer support software to better serve customers and their peers you should look into their suggestion. This allows you to receive critical feedback from your staff on what action actually came of your discussions.

Wrap Up

Humans are not programmed to listen to one another, and it will take time, even for veteran managers to be more open to meeting and sharing ideas freely with staff, no matter their status within the company. With the introduction of an open discussion with your team, you will not only be able to gather ideas, thoughts, and creative input much faster, but your staff will more openly discuss topics with you ranging from office gossip to management chain issues, etc. Overall, offering your team the ability to voice their ideas to you freely can have a massively positive effect on your bottom line, even if you don’t set aside a significant amount of time to it.

How To Utilize Your Team More Effectively

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We’ve all heard the saying “the more, the merrier” and in some cases, it’s true! Teamwork is essential to a company’s success when it comes to decision making. Of course, there will be conflict and disputes; although, without a team, productivity levels and success rates plummet. This is why you need a great team to work with and help make you and the business more successful. Here are ways you can use your team to benefit your company.

FIRST, you need to make your team the best of the best. That requires the right people. To build a strong team, you need to select the best people for the job and cut those who don’t have what it takes. This way, work is always a priority and projects are getting completed efficiently and effectively. You can find this out by:

  • understanding the way they work
  • how they’re motivated
  • how they work in stressful and negative situations
  • their overall attitude towards others
  • what their strengths and weaknesses are
  • how they’ll benefit you in the workplace.

Once you have the desired team, you’re on the road to success, with a high foundation to build off of. Having a good team can either make or break your company.

SECOND, you and your team all need to be on the same page about how goals are going to be completed, strategies that will be used, and company policies that are expected to be followed. Overall you need to be working well with one another. Once everyone knows what the common goal is, you can all come together to agree on important decisions to help benefit the company. By making team decisions, you actively help to eliminate conflict and complaints regarding projects or events. Sometimes choices are better created by a team rather than by one person. This is not only helpful to get feedback from others, but it can also help things run smoothly in the future.

THIRD, we all frown upon co-workers who can’t keep their conflicts separate from the workplace. It can affect the productivity of the individuals and make the work environment uncomfortable for other employees. To avoid this, use your team to build stronger work-related and social bonds with one another. This can be achieved by doing team building activities or going out for company dinners. Having a team that gets along is more likely to be successful in the long run. This is because it won’t allow conflict to get in the way of the critical tasks at hand.

FINALLY with those groggy Monday mornings where you don’t feel motivated are the absolute worst. However, once you enter the workplace and see others being productive, it automatically makes you motivated to do work. Seeing others being productive around you will make you productive as well, which is very helpful when work needs to get done. Therefore, try using your team to keep each other motivated and on track.

In the end, your team is what can either lead the company to success, or failure, which is why you need to utilize them as best as you can to be successful.

How Smart Project Management Software Saves You Money!

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It may seem that no matter how focused you are on work, there are always times in which you hit a roadblock and lose concentration. This is natural; we are only human. Issues begin to form when you return to work, and you are unsure of how to continue from that point. Whether you cannot find where you left off or cannot remain in the same format as your previous work, issues often stem from being disorganized. It may take some time to regain your momentum of work. Office workers waste an average of 40% of their workday (Wall Street Journal Report). Not because they aren’t smart, but because they were never taught organizing skills to cope with the increasing workloads and demands. Smart project management software saves you money.

From a business perspective, this process wastes time and resources as your maximum work efficiency is being hindered by disorganization. This issue often stems from the systems the business has in place to organize the workload between its project resources and conveying the task needed to be done effectively and efficiently. The typical executive today wastes 150 hours a year, almost one month, searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, that translates to a loss of $3,842 (Forbes ASAP). The most straightforward solution to this problem is using smart project management software.

Project management software provides various organization and communication services between employees and their managers that will eventually save the business money. Using the correct organizational tools can improve time management by 38% (Mobile Technology Product). One of the main areas of communication and organizational assistance is in project management. With the software, you can create individual projects that only those involved can access that displays the workloads of each. This is beneficial for the managers running these projects as they can easily see what project team members have completed and have left to do for the project. Through this system, you can visually compute the productivity and quality of each team member and can designate specific work to those more suited to complete it. This will better balance time and resource management.

How Employees or End-Users Can Benefit

For employees, project management software provides a dashboard of all of the projects they are assigned to. This way they can designate their time to assignments that may be more significant or time-based. Through the organized layout of all the work that needs to be completed, project resources will be more inclined to complete one task at a time opposed to multitasking as projects are presented. People who multi-task decrease their productivity by 20-40% are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time. Time lost switching among tasks increases the complexity of the functions (University of Michigan Study).

Project management software is incredibly beneficial for communication and organization to all levels of business. For managers, they can layout projects and work for project team members in a way that designates appropriate workloads. Project Managers know the workload of team members so they do not become stressed and can better assign the project tasks is a more controlled manner. As for team members, they will be better at designating their workflow in an organized fashion to keep it on track. Overall, this will increase the worth of the business resources as it is going towards productivity as opposed to wasted on confusion.

Information Sources From http://www.simplyproductive.com/2012/03/time-management-statistics/