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What are some useful SaaS (software as a service) tools for small businesses?

markadwardmarkadward subscriber Posts: 4 Member
5 Awesome Tools for Small Businesses to help you run your business better.

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.

@bradley_Friedman heads the accounts at LuckyOrange, feel free to ping him.

Check out the rest of this article on my blog

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.

You could contact @Itzik_Levy who is the founder of vCita to get started.

Check out the remaining tips on my blog

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: ScreenshotMonitor
Continue reading this on my blog...

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! I hope you found this useful.

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.

Answers

  • Kent DagnallKent Dagnall administrator Posts: 5 Site Admin
    I use Moz.com, Alexa and the Adobe Creative Cloud almost everyday. SaaS is such a massive part of the market, what industry are you in or interested in specifically?
  • markadwardmarkadward subscriber Posts: 4 Member
  • Ryan O'BlenessRyan O'Bleness administrator Posts: 1,137 Site Admin
    edited April 2017
    Optimizely and HubSpot both offer a ton of options within each platform. Optimizely is a leading experimental platforms that allows you to test several A/B variants and add personalization to your website. HubSpot is a great inbound marketing platform to have. I would recommend checking those out. They're not free to use, but trials are available for both. 
    Ryan O'Bleness
    Community Manager
    StartupNation, LLC
  • markadwardmarkadward subscriber Posts: 4 Member
    Thank You @"Ryan O'Bleness"
  • HelenaSHelenaS subscriber Posts: 3 Member
    This one https://quatrix.it/ can be useful if you wish to avoid your sensitive information get stolen. Better to keep it safe!
  • YourRetailCoachYourRetailCoach subscriber Posts: 30 Bronze Level Member

    Some of the useful SaaS (software as a service) tools for small businesses are:

    • Lucky Orange

    • vCita

    • VoIP server

    • Virtual staffing

    YRC is a Management Consulting Company, especially for the B-C Sector. Our expertise lies into designing of Standard Operating Procedures, Franchise Development, Strategy & Operations services, Process Audits & Training. 
  • Helen LarsenHelen Larsen subscriber Posts: 58 Bronze Level Member
    And don't forget about social media buttons. Take care that your audience could easily spread your content around the web. I like addthis.com
    Also you'll need to get user feedback with comments, offer your visitors to subscribe for your newsletter, security plugins, apps for SEO boost. And these apps depend on your website's CMS.
  • dodolatozdodolatoz subscriber Posts: 8 Member
    i don't know what kind of saas u mention, but if its about erp system, then i have one sugguestion, that is acumatica cloud erp,
  • LouBerryLouBerry subscriber Posts: 15 Bronze Level Member
    For remote teams, I'd suggest using Zenkit. I use it just for my personal everyday life but I can imagine it'd be a great fit for small business. The platform is simple and easy to use, yet has all the necessary features for project management. 

    Maybe this article about remote team management helps you out in some sense as well : )
  • Stren656Stren656 subscriber Posts: 17 Bronze Level Member
    For Voip calling use zoiper, it's really good. Xero is great for accounting software and lets you connect directly to your bank account, toggl is great for time tracking, realtimecrm is great for tracking customer history and your sales pipeline and tasks, gsuite is great for office and collaboration.

    Less work and more sales, check out:
    http://realtimecrm.co.uk
  • swilswil subscriber Posts: 4 Member

    SaaS tools is required by every small business to successfully handles the operation of the business for long run. SaaS stands for or ‘Software as a service, which is subscription based software model that replaces the costly user licenses. It provides variety of IT services to the companies to ease their daily working issues and optimize the overall process flow. 

    Some useful SaaS (software as a service) tools for small businesses are:

    Accounting Software

    The idea behind accounting SaaS platforms is to automate the financial functions involved in any organization. It helps management to handle day-to-day accounting activities, such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, journals, general ledgers, payroll, etc.

    Project Management Software

    The idea behind the project management SaaS platform is to organize multiple tasks and projects. It manages the data sharing among the developers and the front-offices team to maintain data transparency. It helps the organization to achieve ultimate business goals.

    Customer Support Software 

    The idea behind customer support SaaS software is to facilitate a platform that deals with customer complaints and queries in the most effective way. It provides a multi-functional support tool for feature-rich, small businesses, and automates tasks for better and quicker customer support.

    File Management Software

    The idea behind File Management SaaS is to keep and transfer different types of data, such as documents between your colleagues, customers, and partners. It distributes security and usability features that are key drivers for managing a file.

    This way, using a Saas is always the best deal to run your business cost-effectively. For further assistance, you can contact the SWIL team. The team is equipped with experienced developers that suggest the best SaaS service as per your requirement.

  • John G. AnaiJohn G. Anai subscriber Posts: 83 Silver Level Member
    • Accounting Software.
    • Collaboration Management.
    • Business Intelligence.
    • Time Tracking.
    • Website Builder.
    • CRM.
    • Customer Experience Management.
    • Survey Software.


  • Emma DavidEmma David subscriber Posts: 6 Member

    There are several SaaS software that every business must incorporate according to business needs such as call center software, accounting software, HR management software, time management software specially during pandemic, social media management and more. As an employee of an IT firm, we are currently using Buffer for social media and VoIP by CallCenterHosting for calling.

  • RequiemRequiem subscriber Posts: 9 Member

    And don't forget about social media buttons. Take care that your audience could easily spread your content around the web.

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