Time is precious for small business owners. It’s incredibly common for them to be directly involved in almost every aspect of daily operations, including sales, customer service, product or service fulfillment, supply chain management, and hiring and managing employees. With so many tasks competing for their attention, it’s difficult to find time to plan future activities and develop strategies for business growth. It’s even harder to achieve a healthy work-life balance. If you’re a small business owner looking to optimize your time and reduce your stress levels, check out these four useful tools that can help you increase your efficiency and spend your time on the tasks that matter most.
Project management software
A great way to streamline the workforce management aspects of your business is to use project management software. It allows you to plan projects, assign resources and responsibilities, track individual tasks within each project, and support collaboration between team members. Software makes it easy to see the status and progress of projects and tasks at a glance, which is useful for both you and your team.
You may find that project management software helps you reduce the number of meetings with your team and clients. Additionally, you may be able to use the software to track your team’s productivity and use this data to better manage schedules and deadlines in the future.
Different software has different capabilities, but many allow you to set up new projects in accordance with popular project management methods, such as Kanban, Scrum, Agile and Waterfall. This means that you can easily integrate the software with the desired management style of your team.
My favorite tools include SuitableTrello, and Concept.
AI email responders
AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its ability to perform common digital tasks, and as its technology improves, so does its application. According to reports from Quantexa, 45% of people in business use AI to respond to text messages and emails. Many emails that small business owners receive from customers, suppliers, and staff contain relatively simple requests and responses that can easily be handled by AI. By letting AI tools answer such emails, you can free up time for more complex and important tasks and minimize interruptions to your workday from email notifications.
There are several email responders on the market. Some generate suggested answers that you can scan, edit, and send efficiently. This is a convenient way to streamline your workflow and spend less time in your inbox. Other AI tools can generate email responses and send them instantly without you having to lift a finger. This saves a lot of time in the long run, but often requires an investment of your time initially so that you can train the AI to send appropriate responses.
AI chatbots for customer service
Like AI email responders, AI customer service chatbots can handle simple customer questions and customer service tasks, putting less strain on your human customer service team. They can answer questions about your products or services and automate routine tasks such as making appointments, receiving orders or processing return requests. When the customer needs more complex support, AI chatbots can collect data about the problem and forward it to human customer service agents.
There is some debate about the usefulness of AI chatbots for customer service, but it appears that they are Generation Z and millennials are the most receptive to this technology. They feel it helps them solve simple problems faster than talking to a human. For small business owners with tight budgets, AI chatbots can allow them to provide some level of direct customer service on their website without hiring a dedicated agent. For business owners who handle some or all of their customer service themselves, AI chatbots can provide an efficient way to handle simple questions and free up a large portion of their time.
Website and app blockers
Many small business owners could be significantly more efficient if they were free from distractions. It lasts on average 23 minutes to refocus working on a task after being interrupted, and as the head of the organization, business owners may face more distractions than regular employees.
There are many sources of distraction and disruption, but many of them come in the form of notifications on our devices. Emails, texts, and social media updates all demand our attention, and it can be difficult to get ourselves back to work after checking them. Social media apps are a particularly big drain on our time because they are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible.
If your business relies on using social media for marketing and sales, and these days most businesses do, you know it’s impossible to shut down these apps completely. Instead, you can use website and app blockers to temporarily eliminate all distractions when you need to focus on a demanding task. You can set daily time limits for specific apps or sites, or block access during certain hours of the day when you know you need to eliminate distractions.
Use tools to streamline your workday and grow your business
The more efficient you become, the more efficient your business becomes. By streamlining your processes with some of these helpful tools for small business owners, you can free up more time to grow your business and enjoy some much-needed rest.
