When it’s time to scale your business, it’s thrilling, exciting, and sometimes overwhelming. Whether you’re opening a second location or you’re expanding to a larger office, growing a brand provides untold potential and plenty of expected—and unexpected—hurdles.
Between installing the right point of sales systems to standardize your operations across distinct locations and investing in call center software that can help you meet growing customer demands, there are a few strategies you need to incorporate if you’re going to succeed. Too often, a business owner will scale too quickly and without the right systems in place. When this happens, it can destabilize a business and negatively impact your brand’s reputation.
To effectively and efficiently scale your business, here are a few tips, tricks, and tools you should use to help ease the organizational transition.
Standardize your point of sale software.
Even as you scale your business, you need to provide high-quality customer service and meaningful customer interactions. Since many of these interactions take place at your POS system, you should ensure that you’ve installed tools that can help your business grow. Unfortunately, though it’s 2021, you’d be surprised how many business owners still use legacy POS devices or pen-and-paper systems. These POS stools make it harder to keep effective record data, review analytics, and determine whether or not your business is hitting key metrics.
Instead, it’s smart to invest in POS installation. Comprehensive POS installation can help you standardize the POS system tools you leverage throughout your location. Whether you want a POS system with inventory management features or a POS system that will provide a custom experience for your team members, there are options to suit.
Depending on your POS system selection, you may even have a device that supports mobile app access and reporting integration. These tools offer a degree of flexibility, and some of these POS system tools provide limited automation potential so you can streamline redundant or mundane tasks as you scale your brand.
Invest in call center software to improve the customer experience.
Now that you’ve acquired enough customers to scale your business, you also need to retain them. Without an effective support team and customer relationship management (CRM) tool in place, it’s harder for your business to thrive as you continue to grow. After all, you’ll probably be expanding your sales team and customer support divisions. If your contact center software or inbound call center software can’t capably scale alongside your teams, it can place bottlenecks on your customer service efforts.
When you’re choosing a call center system, it’s helpful to look for one that boasts reliability, an intuitive dashboard, and helpful tools to give business owners insight into agent performance and agent productivity. This can help take your customer support department to the next level.
The best call center software on the market also offers advanced technology like IVR solutions and artificial intelligence, CRM integrations, and multichannel management tools. That way, your customer service agent can talk to a person via SMS text, switch to instant messages, and finish up interaction with an order through your website. As you scale, the right call center software can address specific needs within your brand and help nip customer issues in the bud. Maintaining communication channels is critical for brand scaling, so don’t neglect it.
Test new platforms.
As technology develops, brands scale and solutions change, new software tools will emerge to support growing brands. Don’t be afraid to try new platforms, garner insight into emerging technologies, and ask questions about startup solutions. It could make the difference between long-term sustainability and short-term brand longevity. With these tips and tools in mind, you can implement software platforms that empower your brand and facilitate scalability.