The most challenging part of running a fast-growing company is to keep up with all the different moving pieces. From client servicing to employee monitoring, common e-commerce pitfalls to bringing transparency, and reducing errors to tracing field employees – the list is never ending. Of course, you can appoint more people to oversee different divisions of your corporation and do some heavy lifting, but the fact is, it’s the founder who has to bear the load if anything goes wrong. It has very little to do with talent where most businesses tend to fail. What can you do about it? Before we suggest you a solution it is necessary to identify the problems beforehand. So here we have listed some of the common challenges that growing businesses face.
1. Bad Customer Service
Client service is the interaction between the support staff and the customers. This is an integral part of the buying process and user experience, as a matter of fact, it’s the key to continued success in business. Imagine how your customers will feel when your support staff fails to respond to their queries or emails. Those who believe that ignoring these benign emails or failing to respond to customer inquiries isn’t going to hurt them, we hate to burst their bubble. This behavior could hold your business more than you realize. According to a study by Zendesk, 82 percent of the clients have stopped doing business with a firm after a poor customer service experience. While 58 percent affirmed that they will never buy from the company after the negative experience, a NewVoice research divulged.
2. Time Theft in the Workplace
People who are engaged in business are well aware of the fact that true currency is not money, but time. This is especially true for growing businesses as managing your biggest line item of human capital is the most challenging task. When you are self-employed every penny counts and having unexpected payroll expenses can prove detrimental. As a result, it can negatively affect an employer’s ability to sustain and grow a healthy business. For this reason, time keeping systems have become a necessity for growing businesses to manage check-in and check-out of a dynamic workforce. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated time keeping systems have failed to protect an employer from time theft as employees somehow found a way around them. While it’s hard to get the exact figure of loss caused by time theft, one research estimated that it costs employers in the US over $400 billion a year in lost productivity. On top of it, 74 percent of business owners have to bear payroll losses due to buddy punching. Let’s not forget the ones who spend time on non-work related tasks such as personal texts, phone calls, web browsing, social networking, etc. during work hours and get paid for personal activities.
3. Poor Delegation and Low Productivity
If a business owner fails to comprehend the strengths and weaknesses of each employee, he will never be able to delegate better. Successful delegation is critical for any growing business because it fosters collaboration, increase team trust, develop your workforce, make them more productive and allows them to focus on bigger things. You can never realize the benefits if you fail to assign tasks to the wrong people. However, if you know who struggles and with what, it can greatly help you assign tasks appropriately. This means, when there is a time-crunch, you should assign it to the person who can do it in his sleep. However, when there is ample time to complete a project you can give it to the individual who is least equipped to do it, so you can help him improve.
4. Tracking Field Employees
According to a 2012 study, 62 percent of companies that have “roaming” workforces keep records of their movement. Now that’s up from 30 percent in 2008. However, keeping tabs of your mobile workforce is an arduous task. You can never be sure how many stops they have made on their way to the retailer/client, whether they have actually visited a customer or spent their working hours watching a movie in the cinema. But, nothing is worse than an employee sharing your sensitive information with a competitor to pull off a sinister deal.
The Solution
Fortunately, you can evade these disasters by using a single app. A reliable cell phone tracking app like Xnspy can help you overcome these issues. For instance, once you have installed the monitoring software on company-owned devices, you can start tracking your employees’ activities. With the phone call recording feature, you can listen in on who they are talking to and what they are discussing. See their web browser history to analyze whether they are wasting a large chunk of their time on non-office related work. The GPS location tracking functionality, on the other hand, empowers you to evade buddy punching, as employees won’t be able to check-in until they have physically arrived at the office or a particular destination. You can also use the geofencing feature to receive alerts as soon as any of your employees visit your competitors. Moreover, you can access your support staff’s emails with the cell phone tracking app and check if they are ignoring those benign emails from your customers. If so, take a quick action and stop your clients from switching to a competitor.
Having insight into what your employees are doing not only allows you to avoid the aforementioned disasters, but also allows you to reduce errors by catching mistakes before they get out of control. For example, if you have found that one of your employees is working on a low-priority task, you can redirect him by shooting a quick message to say ‘please prioritize task A over B as we have to complete it by tomorrow.’ Besides penalizing employees for mistakes, the program can also be used to reward them. Since the system allows you to see who is slacking and who is giving their 100 percent, you can reward the right person. Seeing that hard work is being appreciated, your workforce will work even harder, hence increasing overall productivity and results. More importantly, employees won’t be able to find a way around the system as sophisticated smartphone monitoring apps work covertly in the background without appearing in the list of installed software. So your employees will never get to know that they are being monitored.
