The holiday season is the busiest time of the year. Businesses have to plan carefully if they want to stand out during this crucial holiday shopping period. This is the time when customers are looking for holiday deals, thinking of ditching old services and replacing them with new and better ones, and spending more than usual. In fact, an infographic by LivePerson says that 68 percent of shoppers will spend more this season on toys, electronics, and clothing. Is your business ready for the holiday rush? Here are some apps and tools that would definitely come in handy during this season:
RingCentral Business Phone System
RingCentral is a cloud phone service that lets you use features such as toll free numbers, internet fax, auto-attendant, virtual voicemail, VoIP, multiple extensions, and more. Since it is powered by the cloud, fax messages and long distance toll-free calls to your number are a lot cheaper than traditional phone service. What makes this PBX stand out from the rest is that you can set it up, manage it, and use it from the convenience of your tablet or smartphone. You can also set up all your calls to go to one business number, even if you have multiple extensions or voicemail and fax inboxes. This makes it easy for customers to recall your number and also makes it easy for you to manage all your call logs. One of its newest features is Business SMS, which enables RingCentral users to send or receive text messages to or from their colleagues, customers, and department. If you’re looking for a quick and reliable way to communicate with your customers and team mates during the holiday season, check out RingCentral.
Who’s saying what about you? What usual keywords are they using to search for services such as yours this season? If you want to know, use Social Mentions. This is a handy and free tool that’s relevant for any business that wants to track their online presence on multiple engines. Just type in a keyword on a simple search bar and Social Mentions scours social networks, comments, images, bookmarks, news, audio, and video sites for a mention of your keyword. It also shows you statistics of sentiment (whether the reaction to the keyword is positive, neutral, or negative); the top closest keywords; the top users of the keyword; the top hashtags; and the sources. Social Mentions works relatively fast, considering that it’s searching the World Wide Web. All in all, Social Mentions is a helpful way to pinpoint problems, know which holiday stuff customers are searching for, and generally involve your business more in the social space. Use it to keep track of your brand during and even after the holidays.
Using this instant survey generator, you can create simple questionnaires for customers and employees. Ask workers to vote for holiday party themes or keep track of their attendance on office Christmas parties. You can also ask customers for feedback about their Holiday shopping experience with you. Survey Monkey is free, but you get more features if you subscribe to the paid versions. You can make unlimited questions and gather unlimited responses, customize the survey design, use enhanced security and more. This is one of the best tools to use for campaigns, events, and projects.
It’s easy to forget even the more important things when you’re attending parties, filling in orders, planning holiday events, and answering business calls left and right. If you’re a busy Christmas worker, then Evernote is the essential app to get for your mobile device. This app is so practical, it has become a household name for business. Save notes and web links, find your saved items easily by searching for tags and keywords, access your data from any mobile device, and share these data with your colleagues. Research, remember, and share more with Evernote. Works great too if you need to keep track of gifts to get for the boss or your colleagues.
There are so many business apps and tools out there to help you beat the holiday rush, but these four are some of the most essential. If you have any other recommendations, sound off in the comments!
