In the 21st century, we’ve grown accustomed to relying on tools and software. No one multiplies on paper when they have a calculator on their phone. No one runs a paper-based schedule, and no one memorizes phone numbers.
We rely on Google for answers, streaming services for entertainment, and social media for interactions.
However, this story doesn’t end with one’s personal life.
Your business efficiency greatly depends on a variety of tools, and here’s a brief list of ten tools that you should definitely start using (if you’re not using them already).
Customer management platform
The first thing you need is a customer management system (CMS), which will allow you to keep track of all your customer data and keep it centralized in a single database. This tool is easy to integrate with most other platforms that you’re currently using, which makes it a great fit for virtually any system.
Just imagine how easy it is to impress a person by recollecting something they mentioned the last time you spoke. A majority of people just don’t listen, which makes a show of genuine interest even more engaging.
The same thing goes with customer interactions. Remembering their previous visits to your site and offering the same products will increase the chance of a conversion, which is already a huge advantage.
In 2024, the use of a CMS in retail is mandatory.
Consent management platform
As a 21st-century business, you heavily rely on user data. However, all of this data needs to be gathered in agreement with the law and regulations. Managing all of this manually is not just a nightmare – it’s near impossible.
You see, when it comes to regulations, you’re not just required to abide by the law of your own region. You also have to abide by the laws of the countries or states of your clients. For instance, if your clients are from the EU, you have to be compliant with the GDPR.
All of this is a lot easier with a consent management platform partnered with Google.
This way, you’re automating the consent management and ensuring that it’s always up to date. This way, you’re taking preemptive steps to prevent future problems.
Project management tools
Centralizing all your team communication, to-do lists, and creating a unified platform for sharing all company files is essential to any team’s functioning. No, this is no longer just reserved for remote work, it’s also something that employees in every office use. It’s superior to whiteboards in every conceivable way.
First of all, everything leaves a digital footprint. You get to see who posted what and when. This way, you can do simple version control and establish who made a costly mistake and is now trying to pin it to one of their coworkers.
Even more importantly, it gives you an easy way of restricting and granting access individually. Every employee has their own projects or cards (depending on what platform you’re using). This way, they have access to materials relevant to their own work.
Titling, captioning, and translating tools
AI tools coupled with NLP (natural language processing) tools have made speech-to-text more sophisticated than it ever was. They have also made translation services more accurate, captioning services with lower margins of error, and, overall, reduced reliance on humans for these tasks.
With some modern tools, you can even get a video summary generator, thus making your content more accessible for people who can’t watch it (due to impairment) and for those who just want to get the message without fully committing to your content (for whatever reason).
The main reason AI is superior to humans in this regard is that it takes place in real-time. With humans, it’s not just the cost of labor; it’s waiting for the service to be done, which makes others outcompete you pretty reliably.
Communication software
Chances are that your coworkers already communicate via an improvised selection of IM platforms. However, you don’t want your teams to communicate via Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger.
Why not?
First of all, it’s not professional.
Second, mistakes are likely to happen. Imagine working on a file, and just as you’re about to send it to a coworker, a random person you have in your followers just sends you a meme, and now they move to the top of your share list. Leaking sensitive information this way is extremely easy.
Third, some supervisors already have a hard time respecting the personal time of their employees (this goes double for remote teams). This will make the lines even blurrier.
With specialized channels and software (like Slack), you can make this a lot simpler.
Cybersecurity tools
Improving cybersecurity is not a simple matter. If anything, it’s a problem that requires a complex solution (or a number of solutions to be applied).
Most accurately, you need to pressure test your system, and this is where vulnerability management in cyber security plays such a pivotal role.
While contemplating potential weak spots and creating theories about how you could fix them is great, what you need is to hire someone for penetration testing and then check attack surfaces in real-time. It’s like pouring water into a container to see where the leaks are.
Keep in mind that while the majority of enterprises pay close attention to this issue, most of them prefer to outsource. If you are determined to handle things in-house, you’ll definitely need specialized tools.
Business analytical tools
What do you do with all the data you’ve gathered?
While data sounds important, the truth is that, on its own, it’s really not that useful.
You see, data is raw material, and if you want it to be something useful, you have to turn it into something useful. What you need are insights or actionable information.
With the right business analytical tool, you’ll be able to process the data and see your strengths and weaknesses. Not only that but with an AI-powered analysis, you’ll even get outright advice on what you can do to improve your business model.
For instance, instead of just hearing that your numbers are down by 5% in April, you’ll get a brief breakdown of why this is the case and what you can do to make things better.
Text-to-video tool
In one of the previous sections, we discussed the concept of taking a video that you’ve already produced and using AI tools to make it more accessible. While this is a scenario where you use the power of generative AI to enhance the content you’ve produced the old-fashioned way, you could also take the opposite route.
When talking about AI content generation, most people immediately think about either text or image generation. However, you can also use text-to-video to create video content from the prompt.
Video marketing is incredibly effective, and video content is so immersive. The only reason why it wasn’t used more in the past is the fact that the cost of video production is too high for the majority of small enterprises. Now, this is no longer the case.
Scheduling and calendar software
While you do get a calendar platform by default, it might be a better idea to pick something that’s easier to integrate with all the other tools that you’re using. This way, you’ll have an easier job at abiding by deadlines. Notifications and reminders can ensure that you never miss anything important in the future.
With the help of AI virtual assistants, these tools are even handier. Namely, you can set them up to listen in and transcribe your conversations in real-time. Then, when they hear you discussing a meeting, they can automatically enter it into your schedule (and ask you to confirm, of course) without requiring your direct input.
Needless to say, this is amazing for your reliability and organizational capabilities.
Sales platform
Another thing your business desperately needs is a sales platform, and picking the right one can make or break your enterprise.
While it’s important to create more than one sales funnel (social media, listing on public marketplaces, etc.), having your own website and an integrated sales platform is pivotal to your branding and your revenue.
Why?
Because people expect to find these products on your site and the fact that you don’t have them on offer means letting them down. More importantly, you want to integrate these with your customer relationship management so that you can collect data in real-time and optimize the platform based on what you find.
Remember that the main purpose of a business is to generate profit, and you can’t do this without improving your sales.
A single tool is not enough; you need a whole toolset
The question of how many tools you need is simple to answer: How many tasks do you have, and how many functions do you need? So, until someone comes up with an all-in-one tool that combines everything we’ve listed so far (and more), it’s up to you to make a selection and create your own toolset.
By Srdjan Gombar
Veteran content writer, published author, and amateur boxer. Srdjan has a Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature and is passionate about technology, pop culture, and self-improvement. In his free time, he reads, watches movies, and plays Super Mario Bros. with his son.
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