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The Essential Tools and Tech Every Entrepreneur Needs
The online retail and service industries have grown extraordinarily in recent years. Despite the global economic instability in 2020, e-commerce retail sales crossed 4 trillion dollars throughout the year, according to a report by Statista.
The digital revolution is here to stay, and if you can seize the opportunity to offer services to customers digitally, your business can grow faster than you had imagined.
With the right tools and tech at your disposal, you too can automate key operations and do more with less capital and in less time, thereby maximizing your revenue and profits. Here are 6 business tools every entrepreneur should invest in to optimize their project management.
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What are the essential tools and tech that every entrepreneur needs?
- Flexible Payment Systems
- Calendars and Automatic Schedulers
- Hyper personalized customer profiling systems
- Analytics Dashboard
- Communication Tools
- Design and Marketing Tools
Let's deep dive into these to get a better insight.
1. Flexible Payment Systems
While tech-savvy customers have no problems paying for services online through a website or a booking platform, others prefer the old-school way of paying at the counter or the venue. That said, both of them would appreciate the same guarantee of a reserved seat!
With advanced and flexible payment systems on your website or booking platform, you can allow your clients to book first and pay later when they show up at the venue. You can always set a fixed waiting period if you are worried that they will arrive late to their appointment. As a result, both parties get what they want, and you get to welcome a lot more customers!
For entrepreneurs running fitness studios and similar facilities, it is critical to keep an eye on your equipment. In such cases, tying in your inventory management solutions with your payment systems will ensure you have a less complicated view of your equipment and other items.
2. Calendars and Automatic Schedulers
If you are running a club, a gymnasium, or any other business with many members, you already know the pain of pushing out last-minute changes, updating and managing waitlists, taking care of cancellations, and keeping an eye on staff schedules.
With digital calendars and automatic schedulers built to support your project management, you can sit back while your management software simplifies and automates your scheduling instantly without compromising on customer experience.
Additionally, you can engage social media schedulers like Hootsuite and Buffer to carry out social media marketing for you. Use these apps to create several posts at once and release them at regular intervals automatically. With regular application, you will be able to improve your marketing and operations planning and deliver better outcomes for your customers and staff alike.
3. Hyper-Personalized Customer Profiling Systems
The better you understand your customers, the better you can serve their needs! Having a comprehensive customer profiling software allows you to make your clients' relationship with you convenient without incurring too many additional costs yourself.
Let's say you run a daycare center for children. If you can give parents the ability to book appointments for their kids through your website or view their schedules immediately from a dashboard, it gives your business a significant edge over your competition.
That would be the first of many steps you can take to cater to diverse customer profiles comfortably. You can personalize your services further by segmenting your audience and leads effectively. This would help you map out what each segment is looking for and what you would have to do to optimize your services accordingly. A CRM platform like Segment , can help you do just that!
This may seem like a lot to do when you have your day-to-day to focus on. You can always streamline your tasks with automation using Omnify's Zapier integration and never have to worry about time again!
4. Analytics Dashboard
Did you know that businesses that take action driven by data are thrice as likely to see significant performance improvement?
When you set up a sales and analytics dashboard through your business management platform, you get a bird’s eye view of how your business performs without getting into advanced technical knowledge. You take better-informed decisions in your professional career and avoid intuitive navigation. Your business flourishes.
You can start analyzing your business thoroughly by first looking at your customer's top picks from your services. Making a note of when they're scheduling their slots can also go a long way towards understanding their preferences. This would also help flesh out the customer profiles you would be building and help you set up your services as per their expectations.
5. Communication Tools
Communication can make or break a business. Whether it's with your staff or with your customers - the more channels and technology you use and the clearer your words, the better you can manage your relationships.
When your staff members are able to share their ideas and updates quickly and accurately, your service experience will become smoother. With effective team and project management tools, you can bring all your employees and coworkers into the same boat, minimize conflicts, and control permissions for your digital inventory seamlessly.
Communication would be especially crucial with your customers, where that interface between your service and the customer essentially sets the tone for your relationship and what your customers ultimately feel about you and your services. Timely and personalized communication can go a long way towards building trust and value in your offerings and making your business look approachable and inviting. The best communication tool will even allow you to automate most communication processes so you share more while actually doing a lot less!
6. Design and Marketing Tools
Do you want to stand out from the crowd on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram? In today's fleeting digital landscape, one of the best ways you can do this is by marketing posts with stunning visuals!
Designing may not be your cup of tea but given the variety of online image and video designing tools and software, you don't have to be. Today, you can explore robust and comprehensive designing tools like DocHipo, Visme, Canva, and Easil, to name a few, without even setting a design budget!
These tools are specifically designed to keep social media visuals and reflect the moods and aesthetics we find on our social platforms with fresh templates giving you plenty of options to choose from. You can highlight your business and attract a lot more people by getting your message across effectively and in some style too!
Revitalizing your business through online tools, resources, and technology is no easy feat. However, the sheer variety of options that are available to every entrepreneur today ensures that with the right combination of prudence and persistence, you will be the tech-savvy entrepreneur everyone is talking about!
Start your tech revolution today with a software that will instantly set up simpler payments, set up your own booking website, organize and automate your scheduling, help improve your customer profiles, power your communication, and so much more - all from one easy-to-use dashboard. Try us for Free.
As customers demand more from businesses every day, entrepreneurs need help. Here is our list of the tools and tech that every entrepreneur must make use of.
