Working in a professional service business is busy. There are projects to juggle, client emails to keep track of, accurate logging of time working on billable tasks, responding to help requests, and more. This can all be overwhelming. It’s made even harder for professional service companies that are embracing the distributed or remote work revolution by allowing employees to work at home or in a virtual, non-physical office environment.
Offering remote positions is a great way to keep overhead and costs down to improve margins while increasing employee happiness and attracting better talent. But with employees juggling so much, how can everyone stay on the same page and have visibility into projects with multiple stakeholders?
Accelo offers a client work management platform that helps professional service businesses become more efficient and profitable - especially when they have a distributed employee-base. Here are four ways Accelo helps distributed teams increase collaboration and efficiency:
1. Get visibility into all sales and project progress
Accelo's integrated platform allows the sales, quoting, and project management process to run with customizable roles and access in a single system. A sales team that might have multiple sales structures can run all sales activities, have records of statuses, potential value, latest contact information, and more in a powerful CRM for total visibility. Once a quote is generated and the project (which has a comprehensive project plan created with the click of a button) kicks off, all members of the team working on that project can see all milestones, tasks (both completed and outstanding), and timeline dependencies in a single place.
No more waiting until a team member has time to meet or go through their emails to get a status update on any sale or client project. Accelo provides comprehensive visibility to all team members into the entire process from prospect to payment
2. Keep all client communications in the Stream
When working on multiple projects, it's incredibly easy to lose track of emails, calls, and notes that are valuable to the rest of the team. With Accelo's communication stream, all emails pertaining to a client project can be automatically synced to a single view so no communication ever gets lost in the shuffle.
There's also the ability to log internal notes and summaries of calls and meetings in the same Stream. If a team member is on vacation or doesn't have access to speak with the team, no worries! Business can continue as usual. The Stream keeps all important information accessible to the entire project team 24/7. (Pro tip: With Accelo, if there is sensitive information being passed, you can also mark communications private so they are not visible to the greater team)
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3. View employee schedules and team utilization at a glance
With distributed teams, a natural hardship includes the inability to gather information quickly by just turning and asking someone a question. Modem tools like Slack and virtual meeting platforms definitely helps with employee communication, but you can't just take a quick poll of who has time open to work on a project or task and who doesn't.
With Accelo, project managers can easily view team members' schedules in one centralized system. This gives project managers or executive stakeholders the ability to see everyone's time commitments. As a result, leadership can then plan and assign upcoming tasks in a way that ensures employees are being utilized correctly. The entire team can confidently trust that each key player is not being underutilized or maxed out. This helps the company by utilizing employees time more effectively while increasing employee happiness and engagement.
4. Provide a consolidated ticketing system
It's not uncommon for businesses in certain industries to have a large number of help tickets come from current customers. And if those tickets are coming through in a system that doesn't talk to the rest of the business, it's easy to overlook how those help requests might be impacting a relationship with the customer. Furthermore, with a distributed team, the close communication to check in on a customer is harder to maintain.
With Accelo's integrated platform, all tickets submitted are attached to the company record. No matter what work you're completing for that customer, their help requests are always visible. Being able to see these requests informs the rest of the team, even when they're dispersed. And with Accelo's automation capabilities, setting up triggers to notify account owners or even a member of the executive team when a single, or any, customer submits a help request is simple.
Offering remote or distributed positions can help a professional service business in many ways. Better talent, happier employees, lower overhead, bigger profits. But with those benefits, the challenges to stay connected and informed about the most important thing - doing great work for your customers - can often be harder to execute and keep track of.
With Accelo's leading client work management platform, your distributed team will be able to maximize efficiency by quickly and easily seeing all progress and information on customers, projects, communications, schedules, and more to focus on quality work for all customers. Empower your distributed team and give Accelo a free try today!
