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May 1

Ways to Streamline Operations and Store Client Information When Working Remotely

By: Tony Catone

The coronavirus pandemic arrived and businesses around the world found themselves scrambling to meet the needs of their customers while keeping everyone safe and not contributing to the spread of COVID-19.

Many businesses are still working through the details as employees have been forced to shift to working remotely from home. With today’s technology, it’s certainly a simpler prospect than it would have been in years past, but it can still present unique challenges depending on your industry. To help your business make the transition, now and into the future, let’s explore ways to streamline operations and store client information while working remotely.

Making the Shift to Working Remotely

Working Remotely COVID-19

No doubt, your company has made the shift to work from home, using today’s impressive integration technology. You’re already holding virtual meetings via Zoom, GoToMeeting, or even FaceTime. You’ve implemented platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack to deliver the best in messaging and deployed desktop access programs allowing your team members to access work computers wherever they are sheltering-in-place.

In addition, your team is leveraging free tools like Google Suite which makes project collaboration easy, while social distancing. So, the question is what else can you do to streamline operations and store client information while helping your employees get the job done and guiding your business to succeed with everyone working remotely.

Review Current Operations

Up until the current circumstances of the COVID-19 outbreak, you may have been operating with a business as usual mindset. After all, if everything is running smoothly, why change? Often, simply because operations are working, doesn’t mean they are working at their best or more effective.  Now, is the ideal time to review your current operations, wading through your employees’ practices step by step as they get their jobs done. This process, while potentially tedious, can help you and your team discover what is truly working well and what is, well, not working so well.

Work together with everyone to evaluate the current practices and find opportunities for improvement. Through this exercise you can streamline procedures, become more efficient, and achieve goals more rapidly, even in a remote working environment.

Engage Your Team with Effective Communication

During your review of operations, you may have notice that though some meetings are necessary, others are not. With that in mind, you’ll want to ensure every meeting engages your employees and is effective and beneficial. Consider if the information could be as easily communicated via chat or even email. Unnecessary meetings interrupt productivity, and while working from home there are plenty of interruptions already in place. Instead, hold only needed meetings, and provide other opportunities to engage your team like fun contests or competitions with prizes. The key is to keep employees engaged and productive while retaining clients and customers during the pandemic and after it ends.

Who Bears Responsibility?

As you review current operations, you may find that everyone or no one has been responsible for certain tasks. In some cases, you may find processes being handled by whoever is available at the time with no individual bearing responsibility. Not every task needs someone on point, but many do, and this becomes more apparent in a work from home environment when you can’t simply peek around the corner to ask if a task is complete. During the streamlining process for working remotely, it is important to determine responsibility so everyone can work continually toward success.

Utilize a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System

Online Operations COVID-19

A Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) can work to your business’s benefit, regardless of its size. The goal of a CRM is to enhance your company’s relationship with your current customers along with former and potential customers as well. The CRM system is customized for your business and industry, helping you collect, organize, store, and manage client information, while streamlining your operations.

A CRM system can help you and your team members increase client retention which increase revenue, gain valuable insights related your company’s processes and how to improve,  enhance client satisfaction with better products and services, improve communication among team members to enhance performance, and increase your marketing efforts even in the pandemic.

Develop a System of Secure Order and Payment Processing

Not knowing how long the pandemic will last, but knowing it will eventually end, means you’ll need to continue to process orders as well as payments securely, now and into the future. Utilizing online transactions through your current merchant processing vendor, if available, is great way to accomplish the task. But if that is not available, consider PayPal or a similar service which allow your company to receive payment quickly and efficiently. You want to keep your clients and team members assured that normalcy will return, though engagement and marketing may change, secure payment processing and storing client data safely will remain.

Contact Us Today 

We hope you found this article on ways to streamline your operations and store client information securely while working remotely helpful during this challenging time. As you consider all the possibilities for your business to move forward successfully during and after the pandemic, contact us today and discover all the reasons to choose UNIM’s Marketing Automation System for your business.