Discover Online Project Management Tools For Small Business

In order to grow your business, you will need online project management tools for project management. Basecamp is obviously one of the most powerful tools around. I have had a terrible time myself working out the best way to use Basecamp in an efficient manner. I tried to use it as task management software and couldn't get my head around making it work efficiently and effectively. But Basecamp is excellent for communication.

Teamwork PM, activeCollab are two other effective management tools online. However, it's not about the product in your business and it's not about the product you're trying to do, it's about the marketing; it's not about the tool, it's about the way you use it. So you've got to work out how you want to use it first and then find the tool that fits your process and your system. These tools have help videos and some fantastic demo videos, but it's all about getting your project management tools and systems right.

Customer management. This is the big one for a lot of people. E support, Kayako is a tool I use. It's an online portal for customer service and ticket support.

If you had a question and you wanted to get in touch with David, you'd go to davidjenyns.com/support and this is an install of Kayako. If you've got questions, I've got answers. What you do is, this is for users. They'd go there and submit a ticket. They can submit to a particular department and then what happens on the back end of that, the clients would submit a ticket on the front end and on the back end, this is where the team members log in and they answer customer support and then it all gets logged in within here.

Rather than having support at davejenyns email address that goes to a particular email box, this is a system to manage it so you have a team and a system around this.

You can assign tickets to certain people, so if there's a red star next to it, that means David needs to check it out. So maybe someone's got a question about Metastock end of day 9.1. So here's the communication backwards and forwards using online project management tools. Someone has said 'Thanks for the quick reply and yes, I was afraid of that. I may just give up on Metastock and switch to AmiBroker.' Anyway that's now been assigned to David, so any communication backwards and forwards.

Each of my assistants will get their own unique log in. They can jump in and answer customer support tickets and then I only get assigned the high level questions. It's much better for customer support.

That's a great little tool to think of using to get a system in place. Sometimes the system is already built. There are tools already out there that you can use to manage a system.A lot of people use quite a bit of Market Samurai.

One of the reasons they use it is, as you're submitting a support ticket, it goes through the knowledge base that sits behind Kayako and searches for answers to people's questions. So people are typing in a question and then suddenly the answers are popping up below, which means you don't need to respond to a lot of the common support requests using online project management tools today.