One of the biggest struggles professional service businesses face is finding the time to focus on growth and building their clientele. While technology has certainly made things easier, it's still difficult to stay on top of everything. Why? Because all too often, your work is scattered across various platforms, making it hard to get a quick (and clear) view of what’s going on.
The good news? With service operations automation technology, it’s now easier than ever to get a handle on this. On that note, here are a few simple tips (whether you’re using smart automation technology or not) to help you stay on track:
Timers allow you to see the total amount of time and money that is being spent on a particular project each day, and the best part is, you can monitor all of it from anywhere in the cloud. Real-time schedule reports and time-tracking apps can even be synced with your smartphone so that you’re always in the loop on any last-minute changes to client work.
Timers are easy to use and are being adopted by the smartest professional service firms that want to leap ahead of competitors in terms of time management, enabling them to put an end to exhausted budgets and resources (without knowing where it all goes).
Are you forever jumping between the tools you use to manage your client work? If so, it’s time to embrace smart operations automation. Jumping between various disconnected tools is a surefire way to waste time, and an unnecessary one too since integrated systems already exist to avoid problems like this. For example, you’re checking to see how your projects are progressing in your Professional Service Automation (PSA), then you jump to your CRM to see when the last communication was with a particular client, and then you move over to your accounting software to try and tally up hours for an invoice - wow! That's a lot of wasted time that could’ve been better spent doing revenue-generating work.
Sometimes, this means saying “no” to competing demands like requests from your team that aren’t mission-critical, or even your everyday admin work that doesn’t drive revenue. Consider bringing in a partner or expert to help you manage existing accounts if you’re struggling to stay afloat with your current workload, or better yet, invest in a smart platform like Accelo that can take on (and automate) that dreaded busywork for you, all while giving you a real-time view of your operations to make quick decisions with confidence.
If you’re ready to accomplish more every day, check out how modern technology is already being used to increase utilization by 150% at a company just like yours. Or to get started with a free trial of service operations automation today, click here.
