So, which customer experience app should you choose among the plenty of available ones in the market? We make your choice easier by detailing the key benefits and features offered by the top 5 customer feedback solutions in the market this year.

Leading 5 Customer Experience Software in 2021

1. piHappiness

piHappiness is a pioneering system in this field and it enables you to capture customer feedback accurately. It is a complete real-time survey and customer experience management platform that precisely collects vital consumer insights. This application deploys several metrics including feedback reasons and categories, single and multiple questionnaires, emoticons, and NPS (Net Promoter Score) to gather customer satisfaction levels.

piHappiness works equally well on Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. Plus, it supports over 90 languages. You can use its robust analytics tools and customizable reports to efficiently resolve concerns and enhance the customer experience.

With piHappiness customer experience software, you can collect consumer opinions using multiple channels and devices including web surveys, automated kiosks, iPads, and tablets. Further, real-time notifications and alerts assist to track consumer trends and resolve problems while the customer is still on the business premises. The solution’s location comparison reports assist to compare consumer feedback across the different branches and locations of a large enterprise.

With piHappiness, you can cultivate customer loyalty towards your product and brand that will ensure your consumers stay with you and give you their business for a long time.

Pricing: Free trial, Basic at $49.99/ month, Premium at $99.99/ month, Premium+ at $149.99/ month. Corporates, contact piHappiness!

2. AskNicely

AskNicely is an ideal customer experience app if your goal is to enable your consumers to provide their feedback in an easy and discreet manner. It enables you to collect real-time user feedback that you can utilize to drive referrals and customer retention. Based on the NPS framework, you can ask the software to send a basic two-question survey to your consumers. Participants can reply with a single tap and this ensures you get a good response rate. The solution helps you to listen to your users in real-time and catch and resolve their concerns before they churn and give negative online reviews about your product and brand.

Pricing: Request for Pricing at hello@asknicely.com

3. Wootrics

Wootric is another NPS system that can help your company improve its customer experience management. With this software, you can deploy NPS surveys in your mobile and web apps to measure consumer sentiment. The solution helps you to assess activating promoters and enhance loyalty and retention. Its other important features are automated surveys and the capability to conduct A/B tests on customer happiness. Wootric segments NPS results and delivers one NPS view across all mobile and web apps to save time. The platform also provides free NPS tracking and unlimited surveys.

Pricing: Free version available, Essential at $89, Pro at $224, Enterprise – contact Wootric.

4. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a customer experience software that enables you to use your CRM application to launch online survey projects for purposes such as a quick poll or market research. It permits you to customize your web-based surveys according to your target audience. This NPS program offers convenient features to help you easily gather, assess, and deliver action on your feedback insights.

With SurveyMonkey, you can conduct personalized surveys on multiple channels. The system enables you to reach consumers while they are open and receptive. From important driver analysis to industry benchmarks, you can identify aspects that require improvement so you can power your organization to achieve enhanced results.

Pricing: Team advantage at 30 € / user / month, Team Premier at 75 € / user / month.

5. QuestionPro

QuestionPro is a robust customer experience app and online survey application that helps you make data-driven and informed business decisions. The platform is simple to use and provides features to easily create and distribute quizzes, forms, polls, and surveys, and analyze online feedback captured from them. Further, you can completely personalize the survey experience for your target audience.

QuestionPro can automatically identify the type of device utilized by the user and reformat the question and design type to fit each device’s screen. This means even matrix questions can be shown and answered on mobile phones. The matrix is transformed into drop-down lists, removing the requirement to scroll across the device screen.

Pricing: Free version available, Professional at $15/month and Corporate at $75/month.

There are many tools that didn’t make the list. As online customer experience is a relatively new category, and it’s constantly evolving, we look forward to seeing how it evolves! Follow Fleep on Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on our news and updates!

Further Reading:

• 25 Best Slack Alternatives (Free and Paid)
• 14 Team Communication Quotes to Inspire Your Team
• How to Build Effective Communication in a Team

The post Top 5 Best Customer Experience Software for 2021 appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Which begs the question…is remote work the future?

Well, the answer to this question is relative given that different circles hold a different opinion.

Working with remote teams can be a powerful tool for companies looking to bridge a skills gap in their workforce. Just like any other job seekers today, tech workers are also looking for organizations that offer flexible terms. For instance, a company looking to hire full stack developer but have a static work environment is very unlikely to rally a large number of developers to apply for the position.

Citing the ever-increasing acknowledgment of remote work, AND CO recently carried out a survey in the US and the numbers tell it at. The results showed that at least 55% of the respondents were full-time remote workers while 28% indicated they work both remotely and on-site. The study also concluded that the cash is in software development where a remote developer can take home over 100K annually.

To underwrite these facts, the number of companies offering remote job opportunities on FlexJobs has continued to grow immensely, and the technology companies are leading the pack. A majority of the 51,000 companies on the FlexJobs’s database have continued to display a positive trajectory in hiring remote workers a trend expected to spill over to  2020.

With that said, remote IT jobs aren’t just limited to tech companies. Virtually every organization, government agencies, and even NGO’s continue to heavily rely on tech workers to expand their online presence and customer engagement.

Below, we have compiled a list of 7 things you didn’t know about tech remote employees and how they can help grow your business.

Improve Productivity

The biggest mainstay of hiring remote workers is improved efficiency and productivity. Typically, workers who operate from an office tend to struggle with concentration given the exceptionally noisy environment. This is especially the case with development work where concentration is super-important in getting the code right.

Luckily, remote software developer jobs give the engineers ample time to concentrate without having to deal with workplace banter like loud co-workers. The minimized interruptions result in hyper-concentration meaning they are able to do more.

With that said, left unchecked, the freedom that comes with remote working can also be detrimental to the productivity of a company.

Research has shown that an average person spends more than 5 hours. This being the domain of operation for remote workers, spending too much time on pervasive devices can reduce the bottom line of a company. Simply put, some people aren’t cut out for remote working while others are.

What is their attitude towards work? How well do they work in a team? Are they time oriented? Can they adapt to remote collaboration?

All these are some of the questions you need to ask yourself in order to create a successful remote or offshore team.

Reduce Overhead and Facilities Costs

Overhead and real estate costs take a huge chunk of the businesses’ income.  Both small and large corporations can dramatically increase the bottom line by shedding off the extra office space, all thanks to the remote working concept.  For instance, since 2012, Cisco has been able to virtualize 60% of the workforce and shed off 30% of her real estate portfolio.  As a result, the company has been able to save more than $200m in travel allowances and slash over $196m from the overall budget.

Commute time is also another great aspect that makes remote work tick. For example, if you take two custom software development engineers both earning $100,000 annually and working 50 hours per week.

Now, assume one of them commutes daily for an hour and the other one is a remote worker. This means the commuting worker has to sacrifice a whole 2 hours per day to reach their workplace, time which could have otherwise been spent working.

At first, this may seem like a no-brainer, but the absolute value of the two workers can be pinpointed in their average hourly wage.

Promote Employee Satisfaction and Retention

Employees who have the freedom to work from anywhere are happier compared to their on-site peers. Happier employees mean that a company can significantly reduce the turnover rate and enjoy all the benefits that come with employee retention. For instance, a newly wedded couple working remotely is highly unlikely to leave their positions if their respective employers allow them to work and enjoy their honeymoon. Instead, they will work even harder in knowing that they need money to finance their vacation.

This statement is reinforced by a recent survey in the UK, which showed that married people tend to be more productive working from home. Once employees are satisfied, their productivity goes up which ultimately boils down to better results and increased revenue for the company.

Expansive Skills Set

Embracing remote employees is a rather significant win for a company facing a talent gap. To stay competitive and sustain a good talent and skill balance, executives should gravitate towards independent tech workers, especially those with vast knowledge and experience.

By employing experienced engineers in a remote working arrangement, the organization not only benefit from the exposure and professionalism that these individuals possess, but also the potential connections and networks they bring along. This is particularly important in the software development world, where the employees’ experience could make or break a project.

The good thing about a remote working arrangement is that you can assemble a dedicated team to strictly work on your project with undivided attention. Whether it’s a large complex mobile app development project or a simple corporate website running on a tight schedule, a dedicated team combines all the necessary artillery to execute the task.

But, there is more than meets the eye…

Hiring a delinquent remote dedicated development team can be a costly affair in terms of time and money. On top of this, businesses that have had to work with incompetent development teams find it hard to recover from a bad reputation caused by substandard web & mobile app developments.

A successful model in hiring a dedicated team of developers entails carefully vetting the company to ensure they have the cumulative knowledge and team of experts to deliver a large project within the stipulated time.

You also need to establish whether the company you are looking to hire have a credible and verifiable portfolio of previous projects to show. If yes, it will help you see what they are capable of doing first hand. If not, are they open to working on a Minimum Viable Project to prove their competence?

Once you are through with the vetting process, set clear goals for the team, sign the contract, and let the work begin. Of course, you will also need to learn how to manage remote teams using some of the available tools on the market to reduce redundancies.

Lastly, you will need to craft robust communication channels to help in effective communication. After all, when working with a remote team, you don’t have the luxury of walking up to their desk to make inquiries.

Bring Fresh Ideas into an Organization

With the ever-evolving nature of the technology landscape, it becomes almost impossible to continually work with a static in-house team and expect different results. Companies that risk working with a static workforce for extended periods end up stagnating or appearing stale altogether.

However, deploying the services of remote workers helps bring fresh ideas and perspectives given they are coming from a different background, culture, and work environment. Moreover, they may also bring new connections to your company, which organically expands your business network.

Ensure Perpetuity

It’s estimated that 74% of the American workers nearing retirement age or those already retired prefer working with companies that offer flexible arrangements. This is against 34% within the same lot that prefers to work from home. Working with older but experienced employees remotely helps a company avert skills shortage as they can be deployed to train younger workers.

This means that there is perpetuity of business operations even when they are no longer there.

Positive Impact on the Environment

Another notable merit of a remote working arrangement is not having to commute to work every day. Essentially, this means massive saving not only in time and money but the reduction of carbon footprint per person.

It’s estimated that remote workers can reduce 54 million tons of greenhouse gas emission annually simply by working 3 days per week at home.

Final Thoughts

Today, businesses are operating in a world where demographics seems to be leaning towards the young millennials. Therefore, it’s pivotal for any company looking to survive these turbulent times to offer more flexible employment terms. With the increasing popularity and consequent demand for mobile e-commerce services, the available development workforce will continue to be overstretched in the next foreseeable future.

Despite pessimists warning that jobs lost to outsourcing statistics are worrying, the employment terms culture-shift will benefit both the companies and employees. For instance, the knowledge gained when engaging remote workers can be deployed to increase productivity and improve the competitive advantage of a company in situations where there are plenty of job openings but limited workers.

The post 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Remote Employees appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Team meetings should be effective collaborative sessions filled with energy and enthusiasm. A team meeting room is a place where members gather around to make decisions and solve problems through creative discussion. Then again, they can be those times during the week when everyone is dying of boredom.

If your meetings are a part of this second group, that means that they are probably too long in duration and too exhaustive. This can result in a mental and an emotional exhaustion of your team, which leads to frustration. Here are some tips for holding successful team meetings.

Don’t be Afraid – You’re the Boss

Managers and team leaders are afraid of team meetings. They believe that the rest of the members hate the them or that they are getting bored. Because of that, they start looking at meetings in such a way themselves.

If you want to achieve significant results, to solve your employees problems and keep them informed, inspired and motivated, you must communicate more often and make them understand what you have to say. Do not remain in the secluded area of your office, just sending out emails. You are the one who makes sure there is effective communication in a team. Confront them with a clear purpose in all your authority.

Look Before You Leap

Although everyone knows how important it is to prepare an agenda, many team leaders hold meetings without it. But if one does not plan their agenda, you will not be focused and able to see what are the priority topics for the meeting are. The preparation may be boring or useless at times, but it is very important for everyone to be on the same page.

You can also invite team members to contribute to agenda items, just ask for their ideas via your team chat a couple of days before the actual meeting, so they could prepare without time pressure. But you should never ask your assistant or some other team member to make the agenda instead of you. You are the leader, and in order to make the meeting important for others first you have to make clear it’s important to you.

Let Everyone Play the Game

There are a lot of different activities to to choose from when it comes to freshening up your meetings. Such is the roundtable learning strategy, in which team members teach each other new something new. You can also try to change the locations of the meetings, bring an interesting board game, switch chairs – experiment with everything to break the monotony. But remember, you must get everyone involved.

The best way to gather up the whole team is certainly brainstorming. Meetings are never just about sharing information. You should always try to solve the problem by working with the group on the spot and coming to a mutual decision. Every discussion should be tied to your broader strategic goals. The best way to accomplish that is to run through all of these goals at the beginning of the meetings, otherwise people might get lost in the brainstorming process. The most common and most functional glass white boards method is a guarantee that all of your team members will always have a bigger picture in front of them.

Good Leader, Bad Leader

Although you have to be friendly and in a good mood during the meetings, you cannot let yourself go completely and be a buddy with your team members. You have to keep the standards high by not allowing off-color jokes, cynicism, sarcasm, picking on team members, other departments or management.

On the other hand, do not show your authority too much and never abuse the power you have. People are not supposed to be afraid of you, they have to love and respect you and, above all, to trust you. Think about what are the must-have skills to be good at management. It is important to build a discipline and run the meetings that people will motivate your team members and push their initiatives further.

Tony Solomon is an an editor and a writer with several years of experience in creating web content. He currently writes for Media Gurus.

The post 4 Valuable Tips for Holding Successful Team Meetings appeared first on Fleep Blog.

It’s always a great challenge to find someone who has all the skills to be good at management. Good leaders don’t just sit and wait until you hire them, but what’s crucial is that before hiring someone, you must understand the qualities – both personal and business – that you seek.

Below are 10 must-have qualities and skills that a good manager must possess by Lucy Adams, an outsourcer from IDAP Group.

#1 Passion for Work

It sounds like an unconditional truth. Everyone knows that “it is useful to exercise regularly,” but only those who exercise with a least some passion can comprehend and follow this statement.

The same applies to business. Love for work is a very important criterion. Hardly a morally oppressed employee will be able to show high results and bring something new to your business. But another question is how to measure passion?

• First of all, ask the candidate to talk about the period when he had to work especially hard. Clarify the reasons for such devotion. Listen to how the candidate describes such an experience: whether it was an interesting, challenging period in life or a nightmare?

Good marketing directors do not work just to get paid. Instead, they direct their every effort on improving the company as a whole and each of its components. They form departments of talented people and never allow them to work without passion.

#2 The Ability to Invent the Wheel, not Reinvent It

Creativity is one of the most sought-after and at the same time elusive qualities. How can you measure creativity?

• In my opinion, creativity includes the ability to generate ideas, think out of the box, research and give alternatives, introduce new methods of work, etc.

If you ask a good marketing director to invent a wheel, he will never answer that the wheel already exists and there’s nothing to do more in this field.

There are very few blue oceans in our world. Mostly all businesses operate in markets with strong monopolistic competition or oligopoly. A talented specialist will look at the problem or opportunity from a different angle, as no one else before did. Most likely, the candidate of your dream has a special notebook with ideas for all occasions.

#3 Loyalty

Loyalty may seem to be just another popular and obscure point in the description of vacancies. In practice, loyalty means that the promoted product become an inevitable part of the life of your team. Can you imagine Microsoft employees using Apple laptops?

#4 At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among his Own

Outstanding marketers like to listen and watch people and what is happening around. They like to learn about other people’s lives, tastes, and habits, as well as things they lack, like and hate. They watch TV ads, click on ad banners and save to favorites examples of the best companies and competitors.

For what? Simply to learn as much as possible about the surrounding world and understand the needs of people, which will help to these people a truly valuable product.

#5 The Ability to Lead

Any manager must be able to manage people efficiently. Team building, setting tasks, ensuring effective communication in a team, motivating and developing the team spirit are a must. Without all of this, it’s almost impossible to create a single line of positioning and behavior in public.

The success of the company depends on the work of many departments, including sales, financial, logistics and development. A good manager knows how to get along with all these people and achieve a certain degree of synergy.

#6 Strategic Thinking

What does it mean to think strategically? First of all, understand the essence of the business, as well as its long-term and short-term goals, at the same time anticipating future needs.

The ability to stay true to your vision and accumulate energy for crucial things is an important quality for any manager. The best leaders first consider how their actions will affect the long-term goals and only then take the final decision.

#7 Flexibility

The world of business changes at the speed of light, and no matter how well you plan, you always have to be ready to quickly solve the problems that arise. This is especially true when managing a startup.

A good manager can turn a failure into success or restart the product or shift the emphasis to other things in a matter of days or even hours. He does not rely solely on his plans and is always ready to meet force majeure face to face, as well as switch to new technologies and products.

#8 Engaging Storytelling

People love to tell stories, but what they love even more is to listen to a skillful orator telling something new, interesting and engaging. Great managers love stories about brands and can easily fit them into the everyday life of ordinary people.

• For example, the cigarette brand Marlboro largely owes its success to the ingenious Leo Burnett who came up with the image of “cowboy-tamer of the prairie.” The image conquered the nation, and in just a year Marlboro entered the top five of the best-selling tobacco products.

If your marketer does such things with pleasure, you’re lucky!

#9 Knowledge of the Audience

An advertising banner or video has only a few seconds to interest the person before he or she switches focus to something else.

A good manager knows everything about people to whom he sells the product and knows how to get their attention from the first second. He easily navigates in the channels of promotion and knows when to use Internet advertising or TV advertising or outdoor ads, etc.

#10 Salesmanship

A proficient manager understands thinking patterns of his employees and customers. He knows everything about the sales funnel, communication with clients and decision-making. He can sale unobtrusively, causing interest among the crowd.

I hope these 10 tips will help you in finding the right person or understand what qualities are worth educating in your young protégés. I wish you best of luck in your every entrepreneurial endeavor!

Lucy Adams is a blogger and aspiring writer who’s always ready to bring the most intriguing topics of yours to life.

The post 10 Must-Have Skills to be Good at Management appeared first on Fleep Blog.

If you’ve worked in the corporate world for a while but are entertaining the idea of starting your own company, then congratulations! Starting your own company may be a daunting prospect, but it can also be very rewarding. There are a few ways in which managing a startup is probably different from your previous experiences…

In one study about startup failure rates, it was found that 3 out of every 4 venture-backed startups will eventually fail. Even more reason to look into how managing a startup is different from running an established company!

You may have significant experience working in business, or even managing a large team of people, but that experience doesn’t always translate perfectly. To illustrate this point, here are a few key ways that managing a startup differs significantly from working as a manager at an established company.

Higher Risk

One of the first things to keep in mind about running a startup is that it’s a riskier prospect, all around. Every decision you make will have a much more lasting impact on the future of the business. Even something as small as ordering supplies can have major consequences for a small company that is counting every single penny.

While this can be a terrifying prospect, it can also be quite rewarding. Managers of startups have more direct responsibility for the fate of the company. While that means that a mistake could be disastrous, it also allows for much more innovation. Someone who is interested in making a lasting impact at their company has many more opportunities to do so in a startup environment.

More Flexible Company Culture

At an established company, things move much more slowly, and the company’s culture tends to sort of congeal. Once the culture has set, it’s difficult for anyone, even high-ranking executives, to shift that culture. Meanwhile, at a startup, the company’s culture is much more fluid. As the manager of a startup, you have more leverage to define the company’s culture, and its habits for everything from effective communication to how to cut costs when running a start up business. You can define goals, traditions, and the way people interact with each other.

More Experimentation

When a company has been around a while, it tends to develop its own patterns of getting things done, and those patterns don’t often change. After all, once they have spent so much time figuring out how to accomplish their tasks, why change from a proven method? It works, so why rock the boat?

The counterargument is that sometimes, the established way isn’t always the best way. Sure, it will work, but is it really the most effective option? An established company will have its own workflow management system in place while startups have the agility to try out and switch between different systems and find out what really works the best for them.

Increased Hiring Involvement

The manager of a startup will have much more direct involvement in the hiring process, or even be the one responsible for hiring from reaching out to sealing the deal. Even when it comes to positions not directly related to their areas of focus, in a small startup, everyone’s opinion is valuable. After all, even if their work does not intersect directly with the new hire’s, each new person brought in makes up a significant portion of the business.

When hiring at a startup, there’s also a good chance that each hire will eventually become a manager or team lead as the company grows. That means that your hires will have much more direct impact on the company’s success and culture moving forward. At a larger company, there’s even a chance that all the hiring will be done by a large committee. There’s a lot more responsibility over the hiring process at a startup.

Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specialized in social media marketing, CRM, and sales. He has managed two startups and currently freelances as a writer and consultant.

The post How Managing a Startup is Different than Managing an Established Company appeared first on Fleep Blog.