Your customers and partners aren’t necessarily near your office, but that hasn’t changed since the pandemic.
What has changed is that today’s technology means your employees don’t have to work from one building or visit customers for support or sales.
If you've recently moved to a hybrid or remote work model or are considering making the shift, now is the time to assess the tools in your tech stack. Remote work requires optimizing all systems, processes, and tech to run smoothly, no matter where your employees or customers are located.
Clear, quick, and consistent communication and collaboration between employees and partners, customers, and prospects is a must when running a remote or hybrid workplace. The right software can make this external collaboration seamless and impress anyone interacting with your organization.
Below are the types of tools needed for external collaboration that will make your remote or hybrid team run smoothly.
1. Collect and Manage Data
If your business is like most, you spend countless hours filling in multiple forms multiple times. Entering data for every department or office is easier with today’s cloud solutions.
This software is a game-changer for companies with multiple locations and information inputs. You need a reliable platform that will help you collect and store all data in one place, from qualified lead forms to meeting schedules, surveys, application forms, legal documents, and more.
Look for software that includes data collection and management, so you don’t need to transfer data between tools or train your team on more software than necessary.
Formstack is an all-in-one solution for data collection and storage. Since it runs in the cloud, it’s the perfect fit for a remote or hybrid workforce.
Related: How to Put an End to Manual Data Entry
2. Communicate With Customers Anywhere and Anytime
If your company has a contact or call center, you might be wondering how any of this applies to you. After all, don’t employees need to sit in the same building to make and receive calls?
Not anymore.
By switching out your on-premise solution for a VoIP system, you can enable your team to take or make calls anywhere with internet access, no matter what device they use.
Becoming a cloud contact center is the next step in the evolution of this important industry. By offering remote work, you can attract top talent while still delivering superb customer service.
Look for a solution available on different devices that keeps data in the cloud for your entire team to access.
Nextiva is a cloud communications solution that offers these features and more to keep your remote or hybrid team delivering quality customer service.
3. eSign and Validate Documents
eSigning solutions aren’t new, but they’ve become more important than ever with the explosion of remote work.
Signing legal or tax documents is already complicated, but digital solutions often make the process even more cumbersome.
Going remote or hybrid isn’t eliminating your legal department any time soon, so you need to choose a great eSigning solution. Look for easy-to-use software that stores documents securely.
Besides ease of use and database storage, optimize for eSigning software that’ll keep all signers updated on the document’s status, including sending a copy to every party.
Formstack Sign is an eSigning solution that offers all these features and streamlines the processes you’re already using at your company to make document signing the easiest part of your day.
4. Create a Comprehensive Knowledge Base
Today’s customers don’t mind finding the answers to their own support questions—in fact, they prefer it.
But customers will only handle support questions themselves if they know where to find your information quickly and easily.
Sound interesting? Enter the knowledge base—a set of documents covering common questions and customer service issues.
By investing in a quality knowledge base, you can save your customer support team time and effort while making customers even happier.
A good tool makes your knowledge base easy to create and maintain. That’s important because an outdated knowledge base can be worse than none at all.
Some of the best apps for creating a knowledge base include Notion, Zendesk, Atlassian, and Groove.
The Right Tools Can Change Everything
We stocked yesterday’s offices with the best tools for on-premise work. But times are changing, and our technology needs to change with them.
We need to equip today’s remote and hybrid offices with world-class tools that help our teams work better. Whether that’s communicating inside the team, coordinating with partners and customers, or just building a culture of quality work, the right tools can help us get there.
Have you recently made the transition to hybrid or fully remote work? Discover the best tips, tricks, and work hacks to help guide your new remote work journey!
About the Author
Bojana is Co-founder and Editor in Chief at Amplitude Magazine. She combines her skills in organization, writing, content marketing, and SEO to meet the people in their search for answers. She has helped SaaS brands like Chatfuel to create their content strategies from scratch.
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