Small business owners are faced with a number of challenges when is comes to competing with large brands and retailers. With this in mind, we thought we'd level the playing field a bit. Stockpile, inventory management for small business, was built so that SMB owners could manage their inventory like their much larger competition. While inventory management is a big deal for small businesses, there are a number of other areas where technology can help out. Let's take a look:
[list type="1"]
Customer Service: There are a number of tools in this space that will allow you to create tickets/requests based on the customer. This function will allow you to manage who works on what and will keep customers notified as things change (like the status of their work order).
Leads and Promotions: The term CRM is tossed around quite a bit in this arena. What you need is a system that will allow you to tie customers and leads together such that you can communicate with each group accordingly. That way you can run customer retention and new customer promotions simultaneously with messages directed at the correct parties. There's no bigger turnoff than sending a current customer a new customer discount!
Appointment Scheduling: There are a number of affordable appointment scheduling tools available online (ranging from $19 - $99/month). You can even integrate these directly into your website so that customers have a place to go that's familiar and easy to find to schedule their next appointment.
Inventory Management: Inventory management for small business is simple and free with Stockpile. Enough said:-)
Bookkeeping and Billing: There's Quickbooks, ADP, Paychex and a host of vendors in this area. My preference would be to find an online solution so that your not faced with a disaster if your computer crashes.
Online Shopping: While this space is crowded, there are a few leaders we'd recommend. Shopify and Volusion are my two favorites.
[/list]
Now get back to running your business, but please remember to leverage technology to make your life much more manageable. Have a great day and try out Stockpile if you haven't already!
