Employee tracking is, let’s just say, controversial. – In an age of remote working and increased awareness of the presence of tech within our everyday lives, there has, understandably, been some backlash to the concept of business tracking tools.
However, it’s unfair to brand all tracking tools as simply the 2021 incarnation of Big Brother. Rather, tracking tools are a fantastic means of keeping on top of all the moving parts within your business. It’s not just about catching slackers, it’s about making your business better for you, your customers, and your team.
In today’s article, we’ll cover three examples of tracking tech with a reputation for benefiting businesses across numerous industries, whether you’re looking to get your startup off the ground or reevaluate your corporation for a fresh start.
Fulfillment is the moment a business delivers on its promises to a customer, whether they’re handing them that product they’ve been yearning for or completing the service agreed in the contract.
Suffice to say, then, it’s vitally important you learn from your mistakes early in the process and work to develop the finest possible fulfillment by using tracking tools to assess your performance.
Perhaps the most easy-to-understand version of this tech is delivery tracking, which allows businesses to monitor how orders out for postage are being handled by courier staff. In a world of next-day delivery, getting this step right is crucial.
Two types of fulfillment tracking tech you should consider are:
While using couriers is a great way to keep vehicle costs down, it does leave potential errors out of your control. This can cause reputational damage and strained relationships throughout the supply chain. By contrast, employing in-house allows you to keep a greater sense of control over your delivery team, but there’s no place to hide in the event of mistakes, or worse.
Many of the leading courier services offer live monitoring or updates to let both customers and their clients know when orders are due to be delivered. This allows you to streamline your business around particular promises, such as integrating a ‘Next Day Guaranteed’ offer into your marketing.
If you’re hiring drivers in-house, using telematics software offers a greater degree of insight into the live location of your vehicles. A courier is unlikely to give you 24-hour access to driver location while out on the road, instead opting for general updates at checkpoints. By investing in this software, you get a greater deal of specification as to the whereabouts of your drivers.
This information can be used to help spot inefficiencies in the business. In this example, that might be bad driving habits or poor route preparation. With the information provided by tracking software, you and your team can begin to work on real-world solutions to the problem, such as tracking daily traffic surges or construction works to avoid.
The foundation of a great business is excellent time management. For some companies, time (and the expertise that come with it) is the only product they have to sell. Realistically though, whatever industry you’re in, the price you charge customers is informed by the amount of work it takes to produce products and services. Time really is money.
Much like GPS tracking tools, time tracking integration represents a brilliant way to ensure tasks are being completed efficiently and highlighting room for improvements. A dream for project managers everywhere.
Time tracking isn’t just about making sure everyone is contributing their fair share every day. These tools can highlight the particular tasks, clients, and meetings that are time wasters, and could be used managed more efficiently. This routes out pain points within the business and allows you to reevaluate everything from your training structures to briefing processes.
It’s not all about negatives though. Yes, time tracking can point out where you’re wasting budget, but it also highlights hidden expertise and skills within your workforce. For example, someone in your marketing team might display an aptitude for writing excellent social copy quickly. From this data, you might spot an opportunity to move them into a more creative role, such as blogging or developing your newsletters.
Some tracking tools we’ve had excellent feedback on include:
If you want to take it a step further you could consider screen tracking options, but they must be handled carefully so as not to diminish employee trust, especially while working from home.
It’s hard to overstate how important a company’s website is these days. Websites are how customers first find you and learn about your brand, before going on to shop with you, enquire about services or recommend you to a friend. With that in mind, tracking the performance and health of your website is perhaps the most important kind of tracking in 2021.
There are a couple of ways you can go about this…
Website tracking tools help to avoid wastage and spot opportunities for business growth. An option such as Google Analytics highlights how users interact with your website, typically providing the following data:
You can then apply this information to your current processes and site structure to make your time more efficient and your website easier to use. Whether it’s crafting better calls to action or restructuring your site architecture to make it simpler to use, you can’t make truly informed decisions without these tools.
All digital businesses should have an appreciation of the impact SEO has on their website and overall exposure. More powerful than a newspaper feature and better for your online reputation than trending on Twitter, SEO works away silently in the background, making sure new customers and clients can find your business.
In simple terms, if people can’t find your business on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine you might use, you’ll only grow so much. That’s why it’s crucial you first learn about the basics of SEO and then invest in tools to track your website’s performance.
SEO tactics are broad and occasionally complicated, so you may want to invest in outside help to get you started, such as a technical SEO. However, tools such as Ahrefs can give you some insight into where traffic is coming from, the overall traffic reaching this page every month and the primary keywords you’re organically ranking for. This information can be used to inform a thorough SEO strategy of targeting fertile keywords and outranking competitors (yes, these tools can be used to analyze them too!)
As you can see, there are a ton of benefits to be found by tracking the many different cogs within your business. From worker productivity to whether or not your website is working properly, tracking gives you not just excuses for errors but answers to the questions surrounding your business that keep you up at night.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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