Business Growth Strategies: How Can My Business Benefit from SaaS Solutions?

Globally, business owners are being forced to learn more about trending business buzz words like “cloud computing,” “internet of things,” “big content,” or “marketing automation.” With all the new solutions being offered, it’s hard to keep track of what you should implement and what can wait.

In this week’s business growth strategies article, we want to give you a broad understanding of what the buzz word, “SaaS” is all about and if automation is something that can help your business grow. 

Business Growth Strategies: What is Software as a Service aka SaaS? 

Salesforce, a major player in the SaaS world, defines software as a service as a, “Way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management.”

Remember the old days when you had to buy a c.d. at the store to install and run a program on your desktop? The internet has given a more convenient and modern way to use helpful software. Now, all we have to do is purchase a product code and download the software straight from the vendor’s website.  

But SaaS doesn’t have to come with a subscription price tag (as seen with SaaS like Adobe or Microsoft Office). SaaS are cloud applications, “which means that most of the storage and processing takes place on computers, called servers, owned by Google, Facebook or IBM. Then, when you connect to them, you use a fairly simple and common client (often a web browser) to access the service and interact with it.”

SaaS Trends and Benefits in 2016 

Now that you have a broad understanding of what software for service really is, we can dive deeper into discovering how they benefit day to day business. To get started, take a look at some staggering statistics showing business owners jumping on the SaaS bandwagon: 

• • 64% of small and medium businesses today rely on cloud-based technology.
• • 78% of businesses indicate that they plan to expand the number of SaaS platforms.
• • 90% of mobile data traffic will be generated by cloud solutions by 2019.
• • 43% of small business owners use mobile as the primary devices for running their operations.

We’re in the business of providing a service. For 30 years we’ve offered business answering and messaging services that offer 24-hour customer service with our virtual receptionists (real humans). We give businesses that want the luxury of having their telephones answered 24/7/365, but can’t afford to pay and manage an onsite employee to do so. Our call center maintains all of the telecommunications equipment, backup generators and are a cloud based answering service.

The benefits of SaaS are familiar to us because we share the same budget-friendly and streamlined tasks. You’re not “buying” or committing to employee salaries, you’re simply “renting” our employees’ time. SaaS operates in a similar manner (minus the wonderful human interaction we bring to the table).    

Here are a few broad benefits of utilizing SaaS applications in your business: 

• • Access or add information no matter where you are in the world.
• • Streamline work productivity by automating simple, everyday tasks.
• • No hardware or IT infrastructure costs; this is the SaaS supplier’s responsibility.
• • Pay only for your usage and upgrade or downgrade software easily.
• • Freedom with cross-device compatibility; giving the ability to sign in on any device.
• • Allowing automation of marketing strategies to save time and money.

SaaS Used for Business Growth

Many business growth strategiesinvolve finding solutions to better manage your time. Small business owners are flocking to SaaS applications to help their businesses run faster and more efficiently.

The cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) market is predicted to be worth nearly $93 billion worldwide by year’s end. That large valuation is due in part to the seemingly infinite amount of SaaS providers and products out there to choose from. You can choose software to assist you in everything from marketing, sales, project management, accounting, data backup to cloud storage and more. The options are endless.      

We are customer service and communication experts, so we suggest you do some extensive research on what solutions will be most helpful to your business in particular. But we do want to include some SaaS business examples to give you inspiration in finding the perfect software feature for you. 

• • SaaS Solutions for Payroll and Accounting: Managing payroll and your overall accounting has become so much easier with the help of billing, payroll and tax software. Here is a site that reviews and compares the most popular accounting SaaS solutions available.
• • SaaS Solutions for Automated Marketing: Marketing automation software allows you to personalize, track, manage and organize mass marketing campaigns. Capterra shares this informative infographic that lists the top 20 most popular SaaS companies for automated marketing; comparing customer, user and social scores.
• • SaaS Solutions for Email Marketing: There are many robust email marketing platforms to choose from. PC Mag’s recent article, The Best Email Marketing Software of 2016, lists the pros and cons of the available SaaS options for handling your email campaigns.
• • SaaS Solutions for Behavioral Targeting: There are SaaS providers like Nudgespot that offer behavioral targeting features that allow you to get deeper customer insights. You can also use software to automatically send targeted messages to lost leads to re-engage them.  
• • SaaS Solutions for Project Management: If you have multiple employees all working towards a specific goal or project, there are very detailed software options to help manage your team. Asana is a wildly popular SaaS that offers heavy duty features like shared task managers, calendars, conversations and dashboards for free.

Since you have so many options to help streamline your company’s productivity and systems, it’s important to brainstorm your unique needs before shopping around.

Gather your partners and/or management team and start discovering troublesome areas in your current operations. Troubleshoot and find your weak areas to give you a starting point for researching SaaS solutions that can help.   

Customer Service Solutions

When it comes to delegating telephone customer service and assistance, may we suggest not relying on automated software to get the job done. Sure, our digital call center has SaaS

to accomplish this and we offer automated attendant and menu services. That being said, growing your business involves keeping your customers satisfied 100% of the time.

Did You Know?

• • 67% of customers hang up on out of frustration they could not talk to a real person
• • 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent.
• • 78% of consumers bail on an intended transaction because of a poor service experience.

We Hope our Business Growth Strategies Help You and Your Business! 

One of the most important business growth strategies is providing exceptional customer service. Turn to SaaS solutions to help your business with standard tasks immediately and automatically. Allow virtual receptionists to give a human side to your brand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

*** 

Review our business answering service rates online or give us a call at 1-800-785-6161 to speak with an account specialist about how we can help your business grow.