Businesses with 6-10 team members reach a crucial point where communication and operations become more difficult to manage. Achieve operational effectiveness with these 4 core operational tools:
- Team Collaboration
- Project Management
- Customer Engagement
- File Storage and Sharing
A key driver of operational effectiveness is how these tools work together to create seamless interactions, ensuring the flow of information reaches all the right people and places.
Take a scenario where a customer enquires about a service issue (operations) and an incorrect billing issue (finance). Although the customer enquiry is a single event, the process and people needed are in different parts of the business.
Having the right Customer Engagement tool enables these issues to be logged for transparency, accountability, and feedback back to the customer. Each issue will trigger actionable tasks in the Project Management tool that get assigned to the best-suited team members. Realtime discussions on the Team Collaboration tool ensures the responsible person gets timely input from others where needed. Integration to the central File Storage and Sharing tool provides access to all customer documentation and internal procedures for handling complaints or refunds if required.
All these interactions are contextually recorded against the original customer enquiry, and nothing falls through the cracks. Managers have full line-of-sight over the entire process:
- Initial customer enquiry details
- Task allocation and outcomes
- Team collaboration activities
- Information or documentation used
- Final customer feedback and close-out
This also provides managers with key insights to improve processes, update procedures, identify staff skills gaps and optimize the core tools for greater effectiveness.
Implementing these tools
If your business has reached or even grown beyond 6-10 team members, then you’ve likely been through the process of implementing various tools to help run your business better. Are you getting the best possible outcomes from these tools? Are you leveraging all the benefits the tool has to offer?
Refining these 4 core tools will greatly improve operational effectiveness and reduce the risk of mistakes. Having a clear purpose for each tool and establishing key measurables for their performance will transform your business and team for the better.
If your business is not yet there, this is a great time to establish the 4 core operational tools to ensure you are set to grow sustainably.
Beyond the core tools
The set of additional tools you choose to use can vary greatly, however they must support your core operational objectives. Having the essential tools align with your core operational tools will reduce manual administration through automation and free up time for your team to focus on value generating tasks. Essential tools are needed to support your business in areas such as:
- Finance
- Sales
- Employees
- Productivity
How do you find the right solutions?
There are thousands of potential solutions you can implement into your business and selecting the wrong ones can create more harm than good. The challenge many business owners face is that technology is not their core competency, so knowing where to start in the research and selection process can be overwhelming. Even when selecting a great solution, many businesses struggle with operational alignment, correct implementation, and user adoption, resulting in operational chaos.
Get specialized support to help find suitable technology solutions and implement them correctly for success.
