New year, New processes?

Yes, it’s that time again when we have ourselves thinking, ‘How is it already a new year!?’ and ‘Where has the time gone?’ Whether these questions apply to personal or professional components, taking the time for reflection provides an opportunity to grow and learn while considering if there’s anything you wish you had done differently.

Personal reflection is always a safe place to start. Maybe you didn’t exercise as much as you’d hoped. Maybe told yourself that you would read 5 pages of a book each night and haven’t. Or maybe - just maybe - you absolutely smashed your goals last year and now need some new ones.

With 2020 being one of the most challenging years to date - when you’re celebrating your achievements and celebrating having hit your goals - make sure to celebrate simply getting through this crazy year because that’s an achievement in itself.

Now, as we dive into the first quarter of 2021, it’s also time to get the cogs turning professionally. While it’s easy to dive in and focus on tasks at hand, it’s equally important to reflect on the past year to reassess your business impact and processes to actively decide what’s working and what’s not.

To get started, ask your professional self:

“Did everything in my role or business run as smoothly as it could have last year?
“Does my team need extra support or more accessible communication channels?”
“How about my clients - do they need extra support or communication tools?

Don’t have answers for these questions? Ask your team, ask your clients. Once you’ve gathered their thoughts, use the time to reflect what they’ve told you and prioritise exploration to keep what’s working, remove what’s not, and find alternatives for what’s missing.

"This year, be structured enough for success and achievement and flexible enough for creativity and fun." Taylor Duval

At Clinked, we focus on the intersections of clients & your business – where client knowledge lives. Our client portal is used by 3,000+ businesses in 22 countries to deliver a seamless branded experience through interactions between clients, partners and teams.

Based on our working relationships, we have a few things to help you consider for 2021: mobility, communication and interactions.

So let's take a look at mobility:

In 2020, we learned that it's imperative that we can adjust quickly to working remotely. Therefore whether you have supporting mobility for you, your team and your clients to interact is a key question. At Clinked, we offer a free iOS and Android app to all clients, not only this we also have the option for a completely white labelled app where your branding can be front and centre. It has all the features you need to stay on top of everything whilst out and about whilst encompassing the very handy chat feature to help you stay in touch! Of course, you can also log in to your account from any desktop or device on a browser as our portal is completely cloud based.

We also need to need to consider communication:

Communication is a continually changing component of all relationships, particularly in a time of uncertainty. For clients and client facing roles, keeping consistent and timely communication can make or break businesses. How did you do in 2020? What methods did you use to communicate with clients, partners and teams? What was hard, challenging or didn't work?

One of the great things about Clinked is the range of communication tools the platform hosts, in fact we even have an instant chat feature that can help keep you easily connected to your clients and team. This feature can be a 1 to 1 chat and it can be used as a group chat depending on your preferences. It’s helpful if you want to ask a quick question but don’t want to wait for an email, or if you want to give updates on work to your team. You can use this feature on both the desktop and the mobile application. Now these are not the only tools we have for communication within Clinked, whether you’re looking to send an organisation wide announcement, send emails to particular groups of people, or start public discussions on hot topics we have all of these covered on the platform.

Secure and tracked interactions:

Did you know that on average there is an online hacker attack every 39 seconds? (1)

With roughly 4.66 billion people surfing the internet each day, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. At Clinked we take any of that worry away and with our encrypted client portal, you can feel calm knowing that your information is safe and secure from prying eyes.

As well as being encrypted, we also have other security features for you to personalise. You will have the option to choose your own password style for your users, you can require them to include uppercase and lowercase letters and digits if you wish. To add another layer of security, at Clinked we also have the optional feature of two factor authentication to give users one more step when logging in. Not only this the portal helps with user accountability as all interactions and actions within the portal are tracked. For example, actions such as user sign ins, documents uploads and downloads and deleting data can be found within the audit trail.

Hopefully some of these recommendations will give you food for thought when considering how your business works this year. The term ‘new year, new me’ is commonly thrown about, so why not apply it to your business too?

A digital client experience may be just the ticket for your business in 2021. Explore with our team on a quick call to get your free trial for 10-days today by clicking below: