The coronavirus (Covid-19) turned our reality upside down and wiped out almost all of our routines by forcing us to stay at home. It feels like we are living in a science fiction novel! Faced with this unique scenario, technology has proven to be an essential ally.
It's useful to connect us via apps like Whatsapp or Zoom and to have a good time in our free time. It is impossible to get bored!
Are you a reading lover? You can download digital versions of almost every book, many for free. Are you a movies or series fan? You have guaranteed entertainment with Netflix or other similar platforms. Do you like music? With Spotify you can listen to more than 60 million songs. Seriously, is there something we are missing to get through the quarantine?
Just as you have probably incorporated platforms and other online services into your personal life, there are a variety of resources to make the most of your time and make your remote work more efficient.
If you are a digital nomad, maybe you are already used to working anywhere thanks to the cloud and you move like fish in the water. But, if you are facing teleworking or home office for the first time, you may be a little disoriented. Do not despair!
Here we will introduce you to a selection of five digital tools that will simplify your remote work. What other advantages do they have in common? They are user-friendly, intuitive and easy to implement, regardless of the size of the industry you work in. Some have long since become very popular, so if you haven’t incorporated them into your work routines yet, now is the ideal time!
Survey Kiwi
What problem does it solve?
We already know: surveys are useful to know what others (really) think: our current or potential clients, employees, event attendees, students and any other audience we care about.
With the development of the 2.0 web, internet surveys became popular and turned into a highly used method. However, the use of online forms does not in itself solve the central problem: you want people to complete the survey. Otherwise, not only will you not have achieved your goal, but your contacts will have felt that they wasted their time.
With an average completion rate of 83%, Survey Kiwi lets you solve that problem and create highly visual and dynamic online surveys in just minutes.
How does it do it?
In order for you to create attractive online surveys for your audience and obtain more responses, you must ensure that they have an attractive design and that they can be answered in the simplest possible way.
Why? Because according to recent statistics, more than 70% of internet surveys are opened on mobile devices. Therefore, your survey must be dynamic to capture the interest of someone who is probably completing it from their mobile phone while on the street, in a taxi, bus or any other public transport.
Therefore, Survey Kiwi automatically adapts all surveys to the screen resolution of any device and displays the questions automatically every time a person answers. Also, it allows you to program your form so that the questions vary depending on what each respondent answers. Thus, your online survey will be easier and more attractive to complete with a phone and you will get more responses.
Another highlight of Survey Kiwi is that it offers multiple uses. Do you want to do market research? Know more about your clients? Create a purchase form? Know if the people who went to your event had a good time? Question your students? Or just create a trivia to have fun with your friends on a topic that you are passionate about?
With Survey Kiwi you can create surveys and forms about these subjects and many others. It even offers you a series of templates, so that you can get inspired and then adapt it to your needs and add all the necessary details to give it your own visual identity.
And what happens if you don't have your own image bank or other design resources? Don't worry, Survey Kiwi has integrations with Unsplash, Giphy, and Noun Project so you can use them in your online surveys.
How to get it?
Survey Kiwi offers different plans: bronze, silver and gold. Check which one is the most suitable for your needs here.
Monday.com
What problem does it solve?
If you are having trouble organizing your work or planning any task - however simple it may seem - it is a nightmare, the enforced social isolation will have only added to your suffering. If you also have to interact daily with many in-house or freelance professionals and get everyone on the same page, then you must be suffering even more than before.
To solve cases like this one, Monday.com, a tool in the cloud which lets you plan and monitor different tasks and processes, exists. It doesn't matter the place or the moment you chose: monday.com is something like a virtual office where a team can get together to continue working in a collaborative way. Leaders can manage and track the team, define deadlines and work schedules, and get live updates.
It's a useful tool to solve the management of a great variety of areas, like Project management, Marketing, Software development, Operations and IT, Human Resources and Sales.
How does it do it?
Monday.com eliminates the need for meetings and endless chains of emails to keep a work team active despite operating remotely.
With this platform you can create personalized workflows, boards with different formats that adapt to any kind of work and are used to track tasks and set project closing dates.
It is also worth mentioning that it has more than 50 integrations with other applications (Excel, Outlook, Google Drive, Marilchimp, Trello among others), which is very useful as you can connect your data automatically and have all the information in one place.
How to get it?
Monday offers different plans. Check which one best suits your needs here.
HubSpot
What problem does it solve?
Managing effective Marketing and Sales actions that reach each client in a personalized way is the key to any organization's success. In a business context, where traditional marketing seems to be exhausted, you must appeal to new inbound strategies to no longer be ignored.
If you have already gone through all the above, you will probably find yourself facing a new problem. If you try to do it through multiple applications, you will have to constantly enter each one, learn how to use them, work with each user interface, remember their passwords, etc... you will end up exhausted!
If you are one of those professionals who have already gone through this tortuous path, you will surely receive HubSpot with open arms because it will allow you to manage all your campaigns and marketing and sales actions effectively from a single platform.
How do you do it?
HubSpot gathers all the resources you need in one place: analytics, SEO, social media, blogging, etc. And that is precisely its differential value.
It doesn't matter if you work in a multinational company or have just created your own startup. With this platform you will be able to work in a comprehensive way and give your users valuable content to make them advance through the conversion funnel through the different steps they have to take to fulfill a certain objective within your website: register with their data, purchase a product or subscribe to a service a purchase, etc.
With HubSpot you can automate all your Marketing and Sales actions. It has a free CRM software to manage your contacts with customers, a flexible content manager of your own to design your website, landing pages, conversion forms; newsletter automation services, SEO optimization and monitoring; social network management, blogging... in short, everything you need in one platform!
How to get it?
HubSpot is a freemium platform. In this link you will be able to see the different prices.
MURAL
What problem does it solve?
The home office and forced telework prevent the classic team meetings for brainstorming development and creativity applied to the development of a product or service.
Thanks to applications such as Google Meet, Skype, Houseparty or Zoom, you can maintain the routine of regular meetings with your team. However, if you need to virtually recreate not only a conversation but also a collaborative space similar to the situation of being in a room with your team and a whiteboard to sketch ideas, then try MURAL.
Optimized for modern work environments, it is an ideal tool for a team distributed in different places, to solve visual problems in an agile and efficient way.
MURAL is used to structure the progress of a project, from the idea generation stage, through synthesis and the establishment of an order of priorities to advance to the final resolution. Creating highly visual and interactive diagrams for design thinking and other agile methodologies is also greatly simplified thanks to MURAL.
How does it do it?
With a friendly and interactive user experience, MURAL is the closest thing to that blank board that, with the contribution of each member of a team, begins to populate with ideas, graphics, drawings, designs and many other things. In that sense, it is the closest thing to continuing to work together in the same room.
MURAL offers a giant canvas in which all team members can add all kinds of content: sticky notes, shapes, images, video links, etc. It allows you to view the entire project in one place and, using a zoom tool, see the details of each element.
Another interesting aspect is that you can organize your workspace in different "rooms": "private", for a specific department, or "open", for the whole team. You can create multiple "murals" for each room and, as manager, grant access permissions accordingly.
In addition, MURAL works with many integrations to create a seamless experience in combination with other platforms that your company uses, such as Microsoft Teams, Excel, Word, The Noun Project or Dropbox.
How to get it?
MURAL offers different plans according to the quantity of users and the characteristics of each organization. Check here to find out which one best suits your needs.
Reply.io
What problem does it solve?
Customized communication is key to building relationships with your current or potential customers, but managing sales processes is often complicated, almost unmanageable, especially when the list of customers and transactions begins to grow. What could you do to help your sales team systematize their tasks while preserving ways to create close links with hundreds or thousands of customers? How many hours of work would it take you?
If you need to automate sales to expand the reach of your company without losing personal communication tools with your customers, we recommend trying Reply.
This platform allows you to put your sales process on “automatic pilot”. That is, automate all follow-up tasks so that your sales team can take care of the main thing: closing deals. In this way, Reply ensures up to 50% of the time invested in customer follow-up at the same time that it will help you find new potential customers on the web.
How does it do it?
Reply combines various resources that sales teams use to contact customers, such as emails and calls, in one place and makes your task easier by automating and simplifying all these routine tasks.
The platform allows you to adjust customer contact and follow-up campaigns by defining a temporary schedule with different stages. With Reply, your customers will receive follow-up emails with a level of customization just as if they had been sent manually. You can even phone call a potential customer as soon as they open that email! It has a quick access menu that will allow you to call or send messages with a single click.
One of its most useful functions is response detection, which automatically sorts all the responses you receive from your customers in the corresponding folders.
Another very useful feature is the Reply extension for the Google Chrome browser, which allows you to discover and attract potential customers on the web. It is very easy to use!
For example, search in LinkedIn a person you would like to interact with. If it was already added to your Reply account, the extension will show you its details. If you didn't have it, it will automatically fill in the available contact details. Then you can add their email address with either of the two built-in email search options.
Additionally, the Chrome extension works in Gmail, allowing you to extract your Reply templates and use them directly in your email account or pass a potential customer's contact details to Reply to schedule their follow-up.
Finally, it is worth noting that Reply has integrations with the best CRMs on the market, such as Salesforce or Pipedrive. Thus, you can synchronize your contacts and simplify the analysis of the progress of each of your campaigns and the visualization of statistics.
How to get it?
Reply has different individual and corporate plans. Learn all your options by clicking here.
Anyways, as some specialists point out, remote work is here to stay, but don't get alarmed. Thanks to these tools, you will not notice the difference between working in your office, home, or anywhere else and you can make efficient use of your time and transform remote work into a positive experience.
Have you convinced yourself about the advantages of being a digital nomad? These five cloud tools will help you to incorporate new routines and organize yourself better to make the most of your time. Start using them right now and tell us if they help you to work more efficiently!