Tips and Tools to Increase Your Team’s Productivity in 2021

With a new year upon us—and new norms of remote working to continue to get accustomed to per the ongoing pandemic—it’s important that teams and managers continue to be flexible yet also highly committed to hitting their goals. Whether you’re pushing to keep your remote sales agents on top of reaching out to leads or heading up a busy contact center, CTM has a number of tools that can help streamline tasks so you can boost your team’s overall productivity. Being mindful of our remote, ever-connected world, we also have some tips for making your overall team’s task management and reporting more efficient, as well as helpful work collaboration tools and ideas to improve overall employee well-being. Read on for our top suggestions for working smarter, not harder, in 2021.

For Project and Data Management

Don’t let tasks fall by the wayside due to a lack of communication or inability to collaborate effectively while remote. Some work management tools that could be worth looking into include Trello, Basecamp, Asana, and Jira, just to name a few—all of which help you stay on top of tasks and collaborate in real-time with commenting, deadlines, assigning ownership of tasks, and more. These tools help add visibility into where projects are stuck and why so you can address them before you lose traction.

Google Data Studio also continues to be a preferred tool among marketers trying to pull multiple data sets together to tell a story. CTM has an integration that allows you to view your call and attribution data right alongside other reporting metrics from different analytics sources within Google Data Studio, which helps you streamline your analytics and reporting process and easily share out data that makes sense to everyone.

Download our new guide on building amazing dashboards in Google Data Studio here.

For Streamlining Phone Calls and Other Communications

Managing calls via our softphone is, of course, CTM’s area of specialty and where we can really help your team grow and streamline your customer communications, whether you’re in the office or remote for the foreseeable future. Sales and support teams especially benefit from functionality like bulk text messaging to automate text outreach or the smart dialer, which allows you to schedule outgoing calls to occur, call scoring, where agents can note aspects of a call/customer and indicate lead quality, or keyword spotting, which will highlight words of intent spoken on a call and also allow you to automatically apply a call score when certain words are spoken. Smart routing is a key feature to implement to ensure that calls get into the right hands quickly. The CTM smart router allows you to automatically route inbound communications to agents depending on unique rules and customizations you set. You can learn more about how our own support team uses smart routing here.

For Onboarding and Training Employees

Many companies are likely setting goals now for how they want to hire in 2021 and bring on new staff, or perhaps work on professional development within their own teams. Fortunately, bringing on new employees or coaching your existing team to improve doesn’t have to stop because you’re in a remote environment. Tools like call recordings are incredibly valuable to help new employees listen and understand how to manage common inquiries or support concerns or to help train your team on how to successfully close a sale faster. Managers are also able to live listen to active calls and help coach agents live with whispers, or overtake the call if needed with the barge feature.

For Managers and HR Teams

The best way to set your team up for success in hitting their goals in 2021 is to be mindful of the many pressures and challenges we’re all facing right now that may be impacting and influencing how we work. With employees, alongside their pets, kids and other family members, at home for most of the day, lack of access to a quiet and uninterrupted workspace is a reality for many workers. To make sure your employees are able to be more effective and efficient, managers may need to be a bit more flexible about scheduling and perhaps accommodating flexible hours to allow for employees to get work done when it’s most effective for them, even if outside standard working 9-5 hours. Incorporating meeting free time blocks to allow for a breather from Zoom meetings when you can, or partnering with corporate wellness programs or apps, can help employees take a break so they’re ready and in the right headspace to get work done.