Published : October 9, 2023Ensuring the day-to-day efficiency of your remote teams along with handling multiple projects, tracking time, and keeping up with productivity benchmarks is painfully overwhelming. If you agree, we’ve something to cut the hassle—productivity tools or remote work systems for remote teams.
There’s been an exponential increase in the number of workers opting to work from home. That’s not all; 32.6 million Americans are predicted to work remotely by 2025. So, it’s clearly high time that you adopt productivity tools for the remote team to promote a positive and collaborative work environment!
That’s why we have curated this guide on productivity or remote working tools for the remote team. It covers the best tools for business calling, time management, project management, email marketing, help desk, remote team collaboration, screen recording, cloud storage, and CRM. Let’s dive in!
"Unproductivity is costly, and you won’t be able to escape its burn when you have less visibility into and control over your remote teams. The right implementation of remote team productivity tools can change this and significantly improve the quality and degree of your remote team management. Adopt the best and most powerful remote working tools for each functional aspect of a business that your remote teams can utilize and see your business transform."
Best Business Phone Solutions
Business phone solutions are multi-line telephone solutions that run on VoIP and offer business texting, call recording, unlimited calling, and conference calling. It helps the remote team to have internal and external business interactions with stakeholders, customers, and clients seamlessly.
The best virtual business phone systems come with a powerful feature stack offering advanced features like call flow and call management options, unlimited extensions, call analytics, and more that greatly help teams that are working remotely.
After extensive research and analysis, we have curated a list of Tools for Remote Teams. These softwares are carefully selected based on usability and satisfaction scores, including features, ease of use, customer support, ratings, and reviews from SoftwareSuggest, G2, and Capterra. Our aim is to assist businesses in identifying the most suitable software to streamline their operations.
1. CallHippo
CallHippo is a leading business phone and remote work solution that aids in enhancing agent productivity, automating workflows, lowering communication costs, and monitoring team performance. It promises 99.99% uptime, zero jitter, and no latency.
Features
- Power dialer
- Smart switch
- Global connect
- Smart call forwarding
Pros
- CallHippo queues all the inbound calls based on their arrival and informs about wait times via a call queueing feature, providing a seamless calling experience for customers.
- This remote work solution allows supervisors to listen to or join active calls with a side barge to offer real-time guidance to agents, improve customer interactions, and enhance agent performance.
- It automatically routes calls based on pre-defined rules via Automatic Call Distribution to improve productivity and optimize call handling.
Cons
- CallHippo has a limited trial period.
- This software’s dashboard may glitch (rarely).
Pricing
- Starter – $18 Per user/Month
- Professional – $30 Per user/Month
- Ultimate – $42 Per user/Month
*Pricing as of 11-06-2024.
2. CloudTalk
CloudTalk connects your teams that are working remotely with your customers and helps you deliver personalized customer experience via its 70+ features and integrations. It automates workflows and gives you critical analytics to improve performance and enhance calling efficiency.
Features
- Call recording
- Verified caller ID
- Call flow designer
- Ring groups
Pros
- CloudTalk allows you to handle high call volumes efficiently via auto answer, increasing capacity and improving customer satisfaction.
- This remote work solution lets you set a caller ID for your outbound international call via automatic outbound caller ID, improving response rates.
- It converts all your calls to texts via call transcription to facilitate quick search from recordings and provide critical details to agents to deliver a better customer experience.
Cons
- CloudTalk’s call recording feature is difficult to turn off.
- This software has some connectivity issues.
Pricing
- Starter: $25/month
- Essential: $30/month
- Expert: $50/month
- Custom: Contact Sales
You May Also Read : Best Call Tracking Software in 2023
Best Time Management Tool
Do you know that an average employee engages in low-to-no value tasks for approximately 51% of their workday? Time management tools can change that for teams working remotely.
Such tools help businesses schedule, streamline, and prioritize projects and tasks. These tools help you seamlessly meet deadlines, best utilize the company’s resources, and effortlessly manage deliverables. What’s more, an ideal time management tool boosts employee productivity, increases motivation, and skyrockets efficiency.
3. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is one of the best time management tools. It provides employee-friendly productivity and time-tracking insights to empower teams to deliver their best quality work.
Not just that, this tool tracks and analyzes every minute spent on each project, task, or client and comes with an option to manually edit time. This helps you pay employees and bill clients accurately. You can easily use Time Doctor on tablets, computers, and mobiles.
Pricing
- Basic: $5.9/user/month
- Standard: $8.4/user/month
- Premium: $16.7/user/month
4. Hubstaff
Hubstaff is remote work software designed to minutely track work hours. Leveraging this tool’s time tracking, automated payroll, and invoicing solution can help you save a significant number of hours every week.
With the Hubstaff dashboard, you can review or approve your employees’ time-off requests, set up paid or unpaid time-off policies, shift schedules, and more, improving time tracking and planning.
Pricing
- Starter: $4.99/user/month
- Grow: $7.50/user/month
- Team: $10/user/month
- Enterprise: Contact Sales
Best Project Management Tool
Project management involves multiple elements like plan creation, organization, and resource management directed towards a specific goal, which can be time-consuming and error-attracting if done manually. So, a project management tool can help you tackle these challenges with its myriad of features and functionalities.
5. ProofHub
ProofHub is an effective project management tool that organizes all your remote workers’ tasks, gives a clear view of each project’s progress, and ensures all the team members are updated on relevant information.
It helps you plan, track, and manage projects of all sizes and difficulties from one place. With this tool, you can easily create multiple tasks or task lists, task recurrences, custom task labels, and more.
Pricing
- Ultimate Control: $89/month
- Essential: $45/month
6. Trello
Trello is a simple, powerful, and flexible project management tool that centralizes your tasks, teammates, and tools.
It comes with lists to give your remote workers the status of each task (to do, doing, or done), boards to keep all the tasks organized, and cards to present tasks, ideas, and information to complete a task.
With Trello, your remote workers get access to built-in automation tools that manage repetitive tasks–track due dates, add team members, create agenda cards, and more.
Pricing
- Standard: $5/user/month
- Premium: $10/user/month
- Enterprise: $17.5/user/month
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing tools aim to optimize the process of sending personalized and contextual email campaigns to large target groups. 59% of customers believe that marketing emails influence their purchases, making email marketing tools worth the investment!
Remote employees rely on such tools to design, send, and optimize emails. Utilizing email marketing tools can help your remote employees manage all kinds of campaigns–acquisition, promotional, re-engagement, and retention emails.
7. EmailAnalytics
EmailAnalytics is one of the best email marketing tools that provides remote teams with comprehensive insights into daily email activity. This tool is private and secure with no software installation requirement.
It can accurately evaluate and improve your team’s email response time. What’s interesting is that EmailAnalytics instantly tells you the number of emails your team sends and receives daily, including spam emails.
Pricing
- Pro: $15/inbox/month
Best Help Desk Tool
A help desk tool’s core aim is to organize, respond to, and manage queries regarding support or service. Mindful utilization can help you improve your customer experience by centralizing all your customer support interactions in one omnichannel platform.
Such tools are worth having because 75% of customers want a consistent experience regardless of their preferred platform of communication.
8. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a reliable source of excellent customer service as it lets you answer multiple tickets with an all-in-one customer care solution. It offers 24/7 customer service with no set-up fee or credit card requirement.
This tool has a multi-channel tool kit, which includes 130+ unique ticketing features and 200+ relevant integrations. You can expect LiveAgent to bring agent-customer communication from across channels in one place via the ticketing system.
Pricing
- Small: $9/agent/month
- Medium: $29/agent/month
- Large: $49/agent/month
- Enterprise: $69/agent/month
Best Team Collaboration Tool
Remote team collaboration tool enables your team to work together on a specific project regardless of each member’s location. Such tools come with a technology stack offering group chat, real-time messaging, project coordination, and more.
These tools also give you an overview of the collaboration history of each user so any member can refer to and utilize it to their benefit.
9. Slack
Slack is an instant messaging application that enables remote teams to share real-time comments, suggest ideas, and communicate with each other in one centralized place. This makes remote employee management easier and communication simpler. Leverage Slack to collaborate with the team or communicate with specific co-workers separately.
Pricing
- Pro: $7.25/month
- Business+: $12.50/month
- Enterprise Grid: Contact Sales
Screen Recording tools
Screen recording or screen sharing tools simply record whatever happens on your screen, including cursor movements. You can utilize it to give instructions, elaborate on problems, or disseminate knowledge in much less time. Imagine doing it all manually and draining hours while inviting errors. Not worth it, right? Screen recording tools eliminate this.
10. Zappy
Zappy is a screen recording tool that lets you capture, annotate, and record with a click. It makes visual collaboration among remote teams seamlessly possible. It lets you set up a shortcut to click and select a specific screen area of any app that you want to record. You can then easily save and share it via URL links or cloud.
Pricing
- Download for free
11. Loom
Loom is an absolutely free screen recording tool (up to 5 minutes) that businesses can utilize to create top-notch tutorials, demos, or walkthroughs, eliminating the need to conduct meetings. You can install it within minutes and easily use it to your benefit. Record and edit your desired content in any application on your suitable device with Loom.
Pricing
- Business: $12.5/creator/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage tools are remote work systems and a medium of data storage wherein data is stored on servers. Third-party providers host, maintain, manage, and safeguard the data stored on their infrastructure. Your data stored on such tools is always accessible via public or private connections.
12. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage platform that gives you safe, encrypted, and easy access to your personal or business data. It facilitates data storage, sharing, and collaboration on files from your preferred device–tablet, mobile, or computer.
Also, you can integrate Drive with your most used apps, including Docs, Sheets, and Slides, for seamless creation of content, real-time collaboration, and smooth file sharing.
Pricing
- Basic: $1.99/month
- Standard: $2.99/month
- Premium: $9.99/month
13. Dropbox
Dropbox is another outstanding, reliable, secure, easy-to-use, and private cloud storage tool. It enables you to save and access your important documents in one place. This tool also facilitates file sharing with team members with a link.
You can also use this tool for document tracking, eSigning, creating backups, and simplifying your work. With this tool, you get access to real-time analytics of documents, personalized document spaces, advanced document controls, and more.
Pricing
- Plus: $9.99/month
- Professional: $16.58/month
- Standard: $15/user/month
- Advanced: $24/user/month
CRM Tools
CRM tools are remote work systems exceptionally fruitful for sales, marketing, and customer service processes. Such remote work tools organize, record, and promote action based on customer data and help businesses track customers and move them forward at every level of the buyer’s journey.
Customer data gathered via CRM tools by tracking, managing, and recording business-customer interactions induces personalization in customer experience and client communication, streamlining sales.
14. Salesforce
Salesforce brings your marketing, commerce, sales, IT, and service teams together with Customer 360. It is one platform that enables businesses to focus on critical areas and deliver an exceptional customer experience. Regardless of business size, customer 360 can fulfill all your ever-changing business needs.
Pricing
- Starter: $25/user/month
- Professional: $80/user/month
- Enterprise: $165/user/month
- Unlimited: $330/user/month
15. HubSpot
HubSpot is a leading and scalable CRM that effortlessly tracks your contacts, automates administrative tasks, and sends bulk emails using just one tool. It’ll take you a few minutes to learn to track minute details of business relationships.
From managing your sales pipeline and checking your contact’s website activity to resolving all your customer issues and identifying new website visitors, HubSpot helps you do it all.
Pricing
- Professional: $1600/month
- Enterprise: $5000/month
Wrapping Up
Although remote working has fewer distractions, it reduces your control over how your remote teams are contributing to the organization. Utilizing remote working tools across business functions and processes can change that and induce efficiency in the organization.
For instance, time management tools let your remote team schedule their day based on the to-do list, and business phone solutions let you communicate with stakeholders with zero friction. Refer to this guide for an easy choice of remote work tools, and make sure to choose the one that aligns with your business needs and perfectly fits your budget.
FAQ
1) What security measures should be considered when using tools for remote teams?
When utilizing tools for remote teams, it’s crucial to prioritize security. Ensure that communication and data transfers within these tools are encrypted to safeguard sensitive information. Implement strict access controls and multi-factor authentication to limit who can access specific tools and data within the remote team software and prevent unauthorized access. Additionally, regularly conduct security audits to identify and address potential vulnerabilities.
2) How can remote teams manage different time zones effectively?
Establish a unified time zone for scheduling meetings and setting deadlines to simplify coordination. Foster time zone awareness among team members, making them cognizant of each other’s locations to avoid scheduling conflicts. Encourage flexibility in working hours or staggered shifts to accommodate various time zones. Additionally, leverage remote team software to emphasize clear communication regarding work hours and availability to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Updated : October 29, 2024
Supriya Bajaj is a senior content developer with immense experience in the VoIP telephony domain. With a deep knowledge of VoIP systems and emerging technologies in the field, she provides insightful and targeted content. Known for simplifying complex topics and her thought-leadership articles, Supriya delivers actionable content for both technical and non-technical audiences.
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