You know the importance of having great customer support. As a young company, you take pride in this—it’s what separates you from industry giants. You’re able to give your customers the individualized attention in a fast turnaround time. You’re even able to have relationships with your customers, learning from them and customizing your product to meet their needs.

But at a certain point, your team has done too good a job. Customer satisfaction grows sky-high, your customer base begins to grow, as well as your product itself, offering more features and applications. This means tickets become innumerable and much more complicated. And that’s when plain email support just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Here’s everything you need to know to help you decide whether a switch is in order.

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One of the most important things when running your business is understanding how your customers feel about your service.

We all know that it’s tough to gather all the feedback you would like. You’re more likely to talk to customers in your support channels when they experience an issue, but that doesn’t always give you a holistic understanding of their experience with your product.

Equally, social proof is a very important area to leverage when trying to bring new customers on board. This means that public praise of your product can increase your acquisition rates and lower acquisition costs.

Positive or negative, reviews – particularly public ones – provide huge value to businesses in how we shape immediate and long term decisions.

This is why we at Process Street are writing up a list of the top places you should make sure you have listings for, should make sure you monitor for feedback, and make sure you engage on to improve your customer’s experiences.

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You click the ‘Contact Us’ page. Nothing happens. First, confusion, then familiar frustration. It was a mailto link. Your computer slows to a grinding halt as a huge, archaic desktop mail app rises from the depths of your hard drive. Checking that the date on your computer isn’t 15 years out, you wonder why mail integration isn’t standard… and what year is it exactly?

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There are many things that Process Street, our process management platform, can be used for including onboarding new clients or launching a website. But an interesting use case that has cropped up recently is using Process Street for managing podcast releases.

Many podcast publishers run a checklist to help them manage the recording, publishing and promoting of each podcast episode. Checklists are a great tool to make sure things get done right, and since Process Street is the ultimate recurring checklist software, it only makes sense that podcasters would gravitate towards our platform.

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The following post is a guest contribution from Cristopher Burge. He is a full-time writer, passionate about technology and business-related articles. He focuses on everything that involves cloud computing, in one way or another. Follow him on Twitter.

The emergence of cloud computing has changed the way organizations and people buy and use IT services.

Cloud-based HR software is technologically focused, but the impact it has on the business and the people using it is profound. While some companies have not integrated with the cloud due to fear of the unknown and the urge to protect their investments, they are at risk of missing out on the innovations the cloud brings to tphe HR department.

Cloud computing is the simplest way a company can take the advantage of technologies without having to spend money on buying expensive computer parts, an IT specialist, and on-site software.

The problem most firms often run into is the integration of cloud computing into their already existing structure, but this process shouldn’t be a daunting one because it is a change in the way IT services are utilized, requiring a new but better way of doing things and just a little cultural change towards a better result.

This article points out how cloud services provide high value with low risk, as a solution for the HR department of an organization, enabling departments to transform the way things are done — from screening to recruitment and termination. It highlights the importance of moving the HR system to the cloud and the method through which any HR challenges can be overcome via cloud computing.

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Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is one of the simplest ways to define it.

In equally simple terms, it is a modeling language used to analyze, design and implement software-based systems.

However, UML diagrams can be applied to more than just software engineering and development.

There are over a dozen types of UML diagrams that are used for a range of different purposes and have significant variances in complexity.

One of the simplest types, which also happens to be the most suitable diagram for modeling business processes, is called the activity diagram.

This is the diagram we will be focusing most of our attention on in this post, though we will take a quick look at some of the other common types for the sake of context and because you may also find them useful beyond the purpose of process modeling & optimization.

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If you have a problem, it’s in your best interest to ensure that trying to solve that problem doesn’t end up causing more problems. This is a good way to think about low-code development platforms.

Each business has its own set of tools for solving problems and getting things done, and for the most part, these problems can be solved by existing commercial apps.

But of course, there are certain needs that off-the-shelf solutions cannot meet, and for these needs a business could approach the problem a few different ways.

If a proprietary tool doesn’t exist, then the best option may be for the business to try and build a solution themselves. This is often done from scratch, and it’s called software development.

That’s fine, except it costs a lot of money, takes a long time, and is difficult to make changes once things are in motion. It also means everything gets more complex, because it’s not just the development team you’re bringing onboard, but designers, testers, data analysts and many others as well.

The simple truth is that it takes a small village to develop good software with conventional methods.

However, there are tools that are designed to give businesses the freedom to build their own solutions, without all of the excess baggage.

These tools are known as low-code development platforms.

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The real estate market is known to require a significant level of human interaction, but to what extent is the human touch really necessary for delivering a high-quality service for each and every customer?

The human-intensive nature of real estate creates a large margin for human error. Poor lead management, documentation, appointment coordination, tenant screening, and maintenance supervision are just a few examples of tasks/processes that are difficult to execute consistently without the assistance of automation software working in the background.

“Real estate is a market that is ripe for technological disruption. Whatever can be automated should be automated!” – Jyotirmay Samanta, How to Automate Your Real Estate Business?

Some of you property managers out there may claim that diving headfirst into the automation craze sweeping the business world is not such a good idea, as it undermines the face-to-face interactions that play such an important role in the field.

This is not entirely wrong, but all things considered, deciding to ignore new ways of streamlining processes will leave you in the dust as your competitors continue to find new ways of being more efficient.

Plus, some industry thought leaders believe that automation actually humanizes the property management experience even more:

“One of the most effective ways to humanize the property management experience is by providing better communication. Figuring out what residents want in order to improve service can be a complicated and daunting task. But today, a company can easily leverage automated surveys and other forms of real-time communication to glean real, useful feedback from residents.” – Doug Brien – How Technology And Automation Humanize The Property Management Experience

Recently, it was reported that total investment in real estate tech has ballooned from $33 million in 2010 to more than $5 billion in 2017. That is nothing short of astounding, especially when you consider the market’s volatility over the past decade.

Technology is driving the evolution of real estate, and market players need to keep up if they want any hope of leading the charge.

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It’s become commonplace for companies to look to workflow management software to help them “trim the fat” and boost productivity metrics.

A majority of savvy business owners are searching for solutions to automate their workflows and push their business to that extra percentile of efficiency.

Multiple different names have been used to talk about this particular kind of tool: BPM software, process management software, workflow management software, to name a few.

Whatever you choose to call it, the proposition remains the same. Workflow management software offers a centralized hub for overseeing and optimizing all of the moving parts that make up your workflow.

These workflows are made up of processes, which are like sets of step by step instructions designed to guide you along the ideal path to a simple desired outcome.

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The Smartsheet platform provides exactly what the name suggests – smart sheets. It is modeled around the classic Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, enriching its capabilities with powerful collaboration features and integrations.

In addition to providing effective collaboration tools, Smartsheet’s user interface is relatively simple, which has earned it a solid reputation as a good project management tool for businesses of all sizes.

So why even look for an alternative?

Well, you may not feel that Smartsheet is particularly well suited to how you manage projects in your team and organization as a whole. Perhaps you are not very familiar with Excel, or just don’t like it very much and would rather use a tool with a different look and feel.

It can also become a difficult tool to manage in the long-term. As you add more and more projects, the organization of vast amounts of spreadsheets can become fragmented and confusing.

So, if you are not a big fan of spreadsheets, and would like a project management tool with a more fun, engaging look to it, here are 8 fantastic alternatives that may well be what you’re looking for.

The main criteria I used for selecting the following applications is that they all have excellent feedback from users, reasonable pricing models, good customer support, and effectively address Smartsheet’s limitations.

Let’s get into it.

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