Reinforce your business for remote work

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has already impacted our life, forcing us to prepare our workforce to avoid operational disruption and seek ways to safeguard our and our employees’ health.

Health organizations around the world, encourage all employees to work from home in an effort to minimize the virus spread. Fortunately, technology is able to provide, at least to many of us, the tools to work remotely and keep doing business as usual.

Following, I will list a few tools for remote team collaboration that will keep your productivity levels high but first I will list a few ideas on how to digitally transform your business with alternative ways to reach your customers.

  Skip, take me to remote work tools

Reach your customers

Now that new health instructions tighten and force us to take further and more tight measurements, you need to introduce new ways to service your customers. You will need to consider taking your sales online with an e-shop, support them remotely using tools such as Team Viewer or anyDesk and provide delivery as an option where possible. This way you minimize face to face contact making your part on minimizing the spread of the infection.

– Take your sales online

If you have a physical store, it makes sense to offer your products online and allow people to view and order them from the comfort of their home. Having your own e-shop you can control your products, sales and invoices and even take it a step further by integrating it with your ERP system and manage everything via a centralized location.

There are quite a few good options, like Shopify and Wix stores where can build a store on your own with a small monthly fee. Alternatively, if you do not have the time or know-how you can hire an agency like BLEND to help your set-up your store in no-time. We do offer quite a few options from custom tailor-made solutions to more cost-effective solutions to help you convert your physical shop to an e-shop.

For restaurants and coffee shop owners, you can partner with an ordering system such as Foody.com and deliveryman.com.cy, where you can list your products and start accepting online orders fast.

– Introduce delivery

You should consider the option of door delivering your products, if you are not already doing it. You can start your own delivery service or if you are a food service you can partner with delivery services like wolt.com that handles delivery for you.

– Online promotion

So, you decided to introduce to your clients the prementioned services; the next step is to inform them. Businesses that keep a database with customer contacts, should contact their customers directly by sending them an SMS, using SMS service or via email using a free service like Mailchimp.

Another effective way is to create targeted ads on Social Media such as Facebook and Instagram but also make sure to utilize Google’s search network to allow people who are already looking for your services or products to find you.

Do not hesitate to contact us, for a free consultation or to help you set up the prementioned. We can help you put together an email mechanism and campaigns to reach your customers, affordably and in no-time.

 Team collaboration tools

Next, I will list a few tools for remote team collaboration that will help businesses who took the right decision and send their employees to work from home.

1. Slack

A digital space or chat room for your whole company, comprised of channels that enables co-workers and team members to communicate in real-time. You can create different workspaces for different teams and organize group discussions with channels. Also allows private messages to share information.

2. Microsoft Teams

If you are already using Office 365, then you should give a try to Teams. A chat-based collaboration tool by Microsoft that is replacing Skype for Business. Microsoft Teams supports flexible communication, including chats, calls, meetings, and private and group conversations.

3. Zoom

Zoom offers a full-featured Free plan with unlimited meetings and for as long as you like, with a 40 minutes limit on meetings with three or more total participants. Its whiteboard feature will allow you to share a whiteboard that you and other participants can annotate on.

4. AnyDesk

A Remote Desktop connection tool like to Team Viewer but without a connection limit. Very handy if you need assistance from a co-worker or vice-versa or a customer where you can connect to their computer and take over and help with an issue they might have.

5. Dropbox

Organize all your files on the cloud and create a smart workspace for sharing and collaborating. You can synchronize all or selective files on your devices and share access with co-workers or clients. There are of course some other good alternatives such as Google Drive and Microsoft’s One Drive you could use.

If you have a file server in your office and need help to migrate to the cloud you can contact our associates at Valicom to set up for you Storage Share, a simple and transparent storage solution for your sensitive data. You can easily save, edit, and share your data with just a few clicks. In addition, you can automatically sync files from your local storage devices with your Storage Share.

In the meantime, take care and keep safe!