This one piece of advice is a game changer for any size company, regardless of the customer service relationship software you currently use. Learn Smartsheet yourself, or hire someone willing to learn and administer it for the company at the operational level.
Clear and organize your brain of the clutter of details, by putting them in Smartsheet – and manage those details by setting up reminders and automated notifications. Track projects and complicated bidding processes, automate workflows, capture departmental data, automatically generate documents with mapping, build a company document library, oversee expenses, use a Smartsheet inventory template, collaborate with others in real time, and the list goes on.
Smartsheet is a cloud-based customizable tool that has powerful features for organizing, tracking and analyzing your business administration. Smartsheets automatically build forms from existing spreadsheets, allowing you to capture and analyze data … and then, once built, automatically compile those analytics visually into charts and graphs on a dashboard.
Smartsheets offer different “views” that organize your data in ways that allow you not only to compare data, but to make it easier to find errors. You’ll start learning with a grid (spreadsheet), because that’s the most comfortable, but eventually you’ll find a use for the Board, Table, Timeline and Calendar views.
Smartsheet has a robust library of customizable business and personal templates built by the pros … along with community-created templates. Some can be quite complicated; you can start with the simple ones and customize to your company needs.
If each department has someone who will input data into Smartsheet, executive leadership can instantly see at a glance how productive each department is by the progress of each KPI, for instance.
Use Smartsheet for collaborative company documentation – and for everything you want to keep track or simply for storage. Each of your managers can use the forms to collect information regarding employee absences, productivity, training, disciplinary actions, etc. Your website can send visitors to a Smartsheet link that collects job applications – and notifies the appropriate department manager automatically. This collaboration is built into each form’s automations, reducing communication pitfalls and instantaneously sending an email to all those who need to know. Company documents, including SOPs, are stored in Smartsheet, and that information is accessible to those who need instruction on any given task, eliminating the need for repetitive training sessions. You can use Smartsheet for simple tasks such as Christmas card lists and driver’s license expiration dates – or fleet registration renewals, for instance.
Operations/Admin can include Smartsheets for company events, company-wide project management, mobile device tracking, department structure, change management, payroll analytics, vehicle fleet management, license status, company documents, bookkeeping, monthly spend, website analytics, etc.
Department Smartsheets can include sales reports, customer reviews, inventory, collections, commercial project tracking, equipment/materials listings, completed jobs, productivity reports, scheduling, licensing, inventory tracking, warranty registrations, etc.
Employees have access only to the forms. Managers have access only to data pertinent to their departments. Executive leadership has access to the complete spreadsheet with all data, along with a dashboard where they can see all company data in one place.
As Chief Operating Officer, I used Smartsheet every day. There is a time investment for the learning curve, but the collaboration, data analytics, task automation and project management features are worth their weight in gold. Free training videos are prolific on Smartsheet.com and YouTube … or paid courses are available online.
You need only one knowledgeable employee in Smartsheet; he/she can train the others as necessary. I’m happy to help you make the move. Business templates, administrative procedures, and training are already waiting for you. :-)
