The advent of technology has afforded a modern-day businesses to be efficient in time management and the running of day-to-day operations. It is hard to imagine operating a business without a computer and business software. Every segment of business management can be automated with the right kind of software. Here are a few general criteria for picking quality business software.
Support
Like with any tangible product, business software that comes with excellent customer support is crucial. When learning how to use a new product, end-users will often have a learning curve and lots of questions. A software product that is easy to use and intuitive certainly helps, but not everybody is familiar with the features right away. A product that boasts of a ton of features needs to be supplemented with sufficient documentation, including tutorials, a knowledge base, and frequently asked questions. Make sure that these helpful resources are easily searchable and navigable. Pick a business software whose customer support is available by phone, chat, and email. Engage customer care during the evaluation period to gauge the quality of support available. Consider NDIS CRM software by Hivetech.
Portability
A company that uses a mix of computer operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux will be looking for software that runs on all of these environments. It is also common for a business to require an employee to work on a variety of hardware platforms such as a desktop, laptop, and mobile device while stationary and commuting.
Look for business software that is portable and can support your varied business software and hardware environments. It pays to also look into software that is supported on the cloud as well so that important business data can be easily synced across all platforms. Fresh and updated information is critical to a successful business transaction and processing.
Backup and Restore
The most important commodity for a business is data. Data not only comes from your clients but also from your employees. Whether it is a payroll software to automate your payroll processing such as a payment hub or to manage customer experience such as a CRM (Customer Relations Management), your business will need to maintain copies of such data to ensure fault tolerance.
When you evaluate business software, find out if the software has any long term backup and restore mechanism. Determine if it supports cloud storage and file-sharing services such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud Drive, and Dropbox in addition to its proprietary service. Perform multiple test runs to see how easy it is to back up and restore your application data before you decide on a purchase.
Reputation
Lastly, it is important to have a relationship with a vendor based on its past performance and reputation. You can find out the reputation of a downloaded software through Norton Insights which will give you some sort of assurance that the software is trusted and has been scanned for viruses. You want to be concerned about product and vendor longevity as well. You can easily find that out by communicating with the software producer to see if it intends to continuously support the software and for how long. Investigate how long the software company has been in business and where it is holding now in the software industry.
A software vendor’s reputation can be obtained through the Better Business Bureau. Similarly, a website ranking and score is accessible from WOT or Web of Trust and McAfee SiteAdvisor. Reputation data is aggregated from visitor and client reviews collected worldwide. Your clients will probably want to research your company’s standing from these resources as well.
If you are in business producing software, the above criteria are probably familiar to you. A software company utilizes other businesses’ software to build their own. Even if the technology is changing by leaps and bounds, the yardstick to measure the quality of business software has not changed much. Having a good positive relationship with business software merchants will help your business running smoothly in the long term.