My virtual people Blog
25 Jan 2017
5 Awesome Tools for Small Businesses to help you run your business better
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Along my journey over the past 4 years working with remote teams based in my offshore office, I have tried and explored various tools, some of which have been instrumental in helping me build MyVirtualPeople.com to the position it is today.
I run a
small outsourcing operation, where we provide Virtual Employees to our clients for
only £2.99 p/hr ($4.49 USD /hr), thus enabling my clients to reduce staffing
costs by up to 80% realistically. Currently we have around 100 virtual employees working for various small and medium sized businesses around UK, US & EU.
So here are
a few tools I use at MyVirtualPeople.com to help manage things – you may find
these tools work well for you too.
Small Business Tool 1: Lucky orange
This is
an amazing tool. Adding a short piece of code to your website pages, allows
your website visitors to chat to a live agent, which is great for going an
extra mile in providing customer service. (seemore about hiring virtual help desk/chat agents here).
Nowadays
I think it’s really important to have an online chat and email support service
due to the way consumers prefer to communicate. Not everyone likes to leave
their number for a call back, and nowadays people just prefer to email or chat
rather than pick up the phone and call you.
What I
really like about LuckyOrange is tha it lets you watch your user browse your
website real time, and offer to chat to them.
If you
missed a user, their browsing session is recorded so that you can watch it to
see how they interacted. This helps you find weak spots on your website, or
pages where people just exit.
Small Business Tool 2: Vcita
I love
this tool. Implementation is easy, you simply just add a small piece of code to
your website.
This tool allows your users to make payment directly on your
website and send files amongst a few other things. But the feature I like most is
the ability to allow my potential customers to schedule a call with me. When my
visitors click the “Contact Us” button on bottom of each page – they will be
presented with a view of my actual diary and the available slots they can book.
This tool has really helped me organised my time more efficiently, as well as
give my potential clients a clearer idea of when they can expect some
communication from me.
Small Business Tool 3: Voip server
Using a
conventional telephone line in my opinion is a very expensive way to setup a
telephony system for a small to medium size business. VOIP has been around for many years, infact
we use it everyday now on tools like skype & watsapp voice calls.
To
handle all your office internal phone calls, as well as inbound and outbound
calls you could have your own VOIP setup. This can be done through a third part
provider, or by literally having a server in your own office.
Setting
up your own VOIP server is not as expensive as it once used to be – especially
with a linux platform.
You
simply:
a.
Buy
a sufficiently powerful computer
b.
Hire a Remote IT virtual employee for £3.99 per hour who will set it up
c.
Buy
some SIP phones
d.
Get
your same remote IT guy to configure the phones and get the telephone system
working.
Small Business Tool 4: Screenshot monitor
This is
a really neat tool if you are working with remote workers a lot – and you are
feeling dubious about working with them. How do you know they are actually
working and not just sitting at their desk watching youtube?
This
tool takes periodic screenshots of your remote workers (which we call virtual employee) desktop so you can get
a clear view of how they are spending their time.
Small Business Tool 5: Virtual staffing
Naturally
my favourite way of growing a business! I’m not being biased here, but I truly
believing outsourcing work to virtual employees is the way forward. Not because I
run my own agency – I started believing in this model back in the days when I
was working for Accenture as an IT Consultant – and they had an army of virtual
employees based in India!
Although
most of my virtual employees work for my clients directly and exclusively, I have a
subset of virtual employees who work directly with me as my assistants on various
activities, such as accounting, marketing, various back office work, IT support
and others.
I really don’t need to hire people at £15-£25 per hour, which would
make it difficult to run my company, as a result I can pass on the savings to
my clients by charging them a small hourly rate of only £2.99 per hour.
That's all for today! Please do
feel free to share some of your own tips for others to learn from. And if you
have any questions go ahead and drop me a message. Thanks again.
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