4 important communication tools for tech biz entrepreneurs

Communication is at the core of marketing, selling and after-sales servicing whether it is communication within the organization, mass communication with customers or audio-video conferences that are so popular in tech businesses.

A century ago video conferencing would have seemed like stuff made for Christmas. Alexander Graham Bell too dismissed the concept as nothing but fairy tale. And yet, we have video conferences, podcasts, live streaming and the humble written text today. However, despite the explosion of communication technology, most tech companies are not utilizing it to its full potential.

To ensure that your organization is making full use of communication technology, make sure you are equipped with the right tools. The following four tools can help you communicate with 1) the general public, 2) a selective audience like a peer group or customers and 3) personal one-on-one communication with customers/clients.

TweetJukeBox: mass communication

The first tool on the list i.e. TweetJukeBox helps tech entrepreneurs save time by using an automation tool that tweets on their behalf. TweetJukeBox is a neat little tool that comes with jukeboxes on various topics from #wednesdaywisdom quotes to Bill Gates quotes; all you have to do is select that particular jukebox and the tool will send out preset quotes and videos as tweets.

It also sends out thank you tweets to your top interactors. Unlike bots that can hamper your reputation, TweetJukeBox offers a pretty risk-free solution. At a very reasonable monthly fee, you can select about 10 jukeboxes and send 5000 Tweets. They also have a free option if you want to try it out. Here’s a sample of TweetJukeBox at work.

SecureLink: secure customer communication

Tech companies often have to solve glitches round the clock to distant countries. However, a lot of their clients involve healthcare and finance institutions who need to follow strict compliance regulations. SecureLink is a great tool for tech businesses who provide remote support over the internet. The added advantages are its strong security and scalability.

When Allscripts needed a scalable solution to handle 1.5M potential support connections, they chose SecureLink and saw a drop of 87 percent in the cost of connectivity. SecureLink ensures all the communication takes place in a highly secure environment with a unique verification method that requires two layers of authentication before gaining access.

This limits hacking threats and data leaks. It also allows you to capture all records at the user level, including files transferred, commands, and desktop sharing, so you have all records of communication that can be used during e-discovery, in case of analysis or even litigation.

GoToWebinar: group communication

78 percent tech marketers view webinars as one of the most effective tactics for communication. Whether you want to speak to your industry peers or customers, webinars provide the most effective audio-visual way to communicate. Also, we are seeing a trend to do as fewer in-person meetings and events as possible and replace them with online or remote events. This way, webinars can also help in internal communication.

GoToWebinar helps marketers and staff to have a quality platform to connect and communicate replacing the need to do physical meetings and events. It saves scarce marketing dollars as well as time to commute, set-up, etc. It is also good for internal training purpose for global companies as it provides several tools to conduct training effectively.

Constant Contact: personal communication

While TweetJukeBox and SecureLink take care of general audience and groups, Constant Contact is an email marketing solution that allows you to communicate on one-on-one basis with various customer segments, who can be your associates, clients, etc. From personalized welcome messages to your newsletter subscribers to birthday emails, you can maintain regular personalized contact with peers as well as customers.

All you need to do is feed in the details to Constant Contact and the autoresponder takes care of everything. You can also set a series of emails for your audience; for instance, if you send 10 onboarding lessons to customers, you can just set the rules and every time a new contact is added to your customer list, Constant Contact will automatically send the scheduled series of emails.

This functionality is important for tech biz entrepreneurs because it takes out the headache of training and onboarding, which eats away a lot of time better spent on getting the balance between email content and design right. What’s more, it comes with professionally designed attractive email templates, so you can send aesthetic emails, something which is not the tech industry’s forte.

All the tools mentioned above provide you great resources to communicate with different audience and in different ways. For a harried tech entrepreneur who needs to keep up with evolving technological changes, it is very important to save time and all these tools are a good place to start and should save you a lot of time!