Cloud collaboration is important in any business; it can have an impact on quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, accountability and ultimately the bottom line of your business. The Cloud allows collaboration from anytime and anywhere; editing and synchronizing documents, as well as sharing ideas, comments and revision history- such as on Clinked. Cloud collaboration has helped SMEs to increase efficiency, productivity, online teamwork and collaboration.

The advantages of Cloud based solutions enabling collaboration are numerous, such as:

Quality

Sharing the wealth of information already available in your company and giving your team an environment where they can share knowledge and experience improves the quality of work. Management always have an overriding view of the project to make sure it is on-brief and on-time; according to Steljes, currently 40% of business managers are changing their workplace models to be more collaborative. Using collaborative tools can help transform your workplace into a hive of productivity, through team collaboration-in real time and from anywhere. Defacto Research claims that “55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee a better service”.

Productivity

Through sharing documents and files online, teams increase ideas and productivity. Workplaces can therefore save time by managing and simplifying workflows, and discussing and sharing documents online. They can also reduce travel time and costs by meeting virtually and collaborating online. Steljes also reported that Over 25% of companies believe internal communication problems are a barrier to improving productivity. By utilising Cloud collaboration across multiple devices, businesses can achieve more flexibility and therefore real time progress and increased productivity.

Customer Satisfaction

By allowing your customers and partners to collaborate through the process you stand a much better chance of finding mutually beneficial solutions faster. Through more productivity and shared ideas and more collaboration on a project you can produce better quality outcomes. Your clients will also feel much more engaged with your team and your brand and be more likely to return for future projects. “A customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service related rather than product related” (Bain & Company).

Accountability

You can manage the timings of multiple projects easily, while also measuring the contribution from each member of your team. You can improve efficiency and decision making, while security ensures data is only accessible to permitted users and protects your data in the cloud.

Cloud collaboration tools are becoming more business critical with the increase in remote working and the need to differentiate your business and engage with clients in different ways.