One of the more challenging parts of building a business, especially a tech business has been getting the right systems in place.
I've played with dozens of systems, platforms and tools looking for the single pane of glass that can do everything we want it to do.
In reality though, that system doesn't exist. Well not in any off the shelf website you can sign up for anyway.
You could build your own system, which would be great, but the development cost would be astronomical, and as a small business, largely bootstrapping itself, that's not an option.
So ultimately, you end up using a dozen different systems cobbled together to deliver what you need it to. Not always ideal, and there certainly is a lot of duplication and weird things, but hey, it is what it is.
Right now our stack looks a bit like this:
Microsoft Teams: This is our internal company chat platform. We have numerous chat spaces for various things, and everyone is pretty much in every chat. We used Google Spaces for a long time, and that was great, but we migrated aways from Google to Microsoft, so chose Teams.
Crisp: We've quite recently switched to Crisp for support. It's a Helpdesk turned chat app. Basically, emails, WhatsApps, and website chats all come to the same place, making supporting clients a bit simpler.
On the support front we've been through a bit of an evolution. When we started Rocking, we used WhatsApp groups for everything. Which was great, but as we branched out of the ISP space, it became a bit of a nightmare.
Crisp brings us back to that real time type of support that we used to offer, but in a more sane interface for us as a team.
Trello: Crisp is pretty much a simple messaging platform, so nothing there is static for very long. We create projects in Trello to manage things that take a little longer than just simple replies.
Go High Level: This is the ultimate Swiss Army knife of marketing and operation tools. I'm still trying to work out exactly how it all fits in with the above tools, but right now we're leaning heavily on the CRM aspect of GHL to setup better comms with customers.
One tool I'm quite eager to use in GHL is automations, where we can create a sequence of emails and send them to clients. So we have a breakdown of all our products and services and once a customer is added to the sequence they get an email every week or two explaining various services.
I think that'll be a great marketing tool, and also allows us to educate clients on how to engage with us, and use our products and services.
Circle: Lastly, we have Circle. I'm quite bullish on the whole community vibe, and while Circle is exactly that, I'm not really using Circle for the community aspect. It's a great layout for a functional website. I have a couple of ideas that I want to implement in Circle:
1- Courses; I want to create a bunch of courses that help educate our clients and help them get a better grasp on the tech they use.
2- Customer areas: Built into the whole community vibe in Circle is the ability to create spaces that are restricted to certain people only. So it's a really cheap way to create a client dashboard.
3- Group Chat: This one is still highly experimental, but in Circle you can create chat spaces, and then only add staff from a single client to them. So think WhatsApp groups, but inside your own website with a paywall around it.
That's pretty much where we are at the moment with regards to our tools and systems that we use.
I'd love your feedback, and to hear what you use as tools and systems in your business, so come find me on X and let's chat.