The adoption of software as a service, or SaaS, keeps growing at an astonishing pace in 2020. Research says that 93% of companies are adopting or planning to adopt the cloud. In 2020, it is expected that 85% of small businesses will invest in SaaS solutions.
The benefits of SaaS are multiple, from reducing costs to streamlining business operations. However, one of their major advantages lies in the fact that they enhance the overall workplace productivity and ensure faster growth of small businesses.
Here is how SaaS can help your small business improve employee productivity.
Improving Collaboration
SaaS tools are cloud-based. Therefore, your employees can use them, irrespective of their time zone. This is particularly important for small businesses striving to invest more in flexible work arrangements and hiring remote employees.
Let’s take the example of collaboration platforms like Hibox. With their help, you can create new projects and tasks easily and assign the right people to them. These tools let your employees attach and download documents, share feedback, exchange ideas, and report bugs in real-time. They will stay on top of their tasks and deadlines and track teams’ performance from easy-to-understand dashboards.
Hibox even offers an AI bot that recognizes patterns in employees’ communication and helps them perform their daily tasks. Above all, they will stop receiving a bunch of irrelevant emails. Project management tools ensure that each notification an employee receives is relevant to them. This is especially important, given that workers usually waste 4.1 hours checking their work email every day.
With the help of these SaaS tools, you will coordinate meetings more efficiently, minimize travel costs, and give your employees a chance to talk in person, regardless of their geolocation.
Automating Many Tasks
Managing business operations manually takes time and may still result in many inaccuracies. To give your business a notable boost, you should centralize your operations under the right SaaS tools. By automating your business processes, you can streamline many trivial and repetitive aspects of your job, minimize human error, and grow your small business faster.
Apart from the above mentioned collaboration tools, there are many business operations you can automate using SaaS solutions.
- Accounting
Accounting tools will automate your accounting processes and help your accountants get rid of mountains of paperwork. For example, with tools like Xero, you can log in from wherever you are and get insights into your cash. You can also use them to send invoices, pay bills, and reconcile faster.
- Manufacturing
When using Excel spreadsheets, racking your materials, manufacturing processes, inventory, and sales is extremely complicated. It would eat up lots of your time and yet, result in many inaccuracies. This is one of the most significant processes you should automate.
Cloud-based manufacturing software for small business needs like Erpag lets you centralize all relevant business operations, from CRM and sales to manufacturing and inventory management. Apart from tracking your data from multiple devices in real-time, you can also integrate your MRP software with your accounting apps or ecommerce platforms. This way, you can get better insights into your products and current market demands and adapt to them faster.
- Website Analytics
Website analytics tools, like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or SEMrush will give you better insights into your website performance. They let you measure your digital marketing metrics, gain user insights, and audit your performance via easy-to-understand dashboards.
- Social Media Management
With social media management software like Hootsuite, you can automate your social media sharing activities so you can ensure greater consistency of your accounts. It also provides you with data analytics features, giving you better insights into your social media presence.
Reducing Costs
SaaS tools work on the pay-as-you-go principle, meaning you will only pay for a monthly subscription fee. Companies can choose the pricing plan according to their current needs and scale it up and down over time. This is what makes SaaS tools attractive to small businesses that carefully invest their limited budgets into new technologies.
Above all, the initial investments you will need to make are lower, when compared to building an on-premise data centers Namely, keeping your data in-house means you will need to manage applications, data, middleware, runtime, servers, storage, and networking on your own. You will need to allocate more resources to building a reliable IT team and purchase new equipment to ensure there are no downtimes. This is where investing in SaaS can help. Like I have already mentioned, you do not need to worry about hardware and software maintenance or hiring new IT staff, as all relevant updates and checkups are performed by a third-party SaaS provider.
Boosting Customer Satisfaction and Conversions
Gathering and organizing customer data is one of the most complex and time-consuming tasks. Above all, it is not forgiving of mistakes, as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and sales. This is where a CRM tool may help.
There are many CRM tools to invest in, including HubSpot Sales Hub, Agile CRM, and Zoho CRM. Below are just some of their major benefits:
- Automation: Time-consuming administrative tasks, such as recording conversations, customer segmentation, saving contact information, and entering data manually, will be facilitated with the implementation of CRM systems. By automating many aspects of their jobs, reps can now spend more time on more complex tasks.
- Scalability: CRM software adapts to your business’ needs and supports your company’s growth. Be it recording a greater number of customer interactions or generating more leads, CRM tools help your employees complete tasks more efficiently.
- Improved teams’ communication: With the help of a CRM, your teams can collaborate easier. They can tag customer reps and managers to share information with them or reassign tasks with a click of a button. Moreover, they can communicate with their colleagues directly from the CRM platform.
- Forecasting market needs: With a CRM tool, you can track your key metrics and create actionable sales reports. This way, your sales and marketing teams will manage their contacts and deals more strategically, forecast key market changes, and adapt to them.
Over to You
In today’s era of sophisticated tech innovations, migrating to the cloud is not optional anymore. It has become a necessity.
By taking care of many repetitive and manual tasks, SaaS will improve your teams’ productivity and morale and let them focus on more creative and complex aspects of their jobs. Most importantly, many SaaS tools are specifically designed for small businesses operating with limited budgets. They let you pay only for those services you are using and, above all, they do not force you to invest in complicated IT infrastructures or teams.
Instead, they will perform software and hardware maintenance for you, letting you focus on your business growth and team productivity.
How do SaaS tools help your SMB?
