Techblog
SME Enablement: Online toolkits for SMEs - Financial Management Toolkit and Customer Service Toolkit
As a business owner, you might sometimes find it challenging to manage your financials, or improve on service levels. Find out how two new online toolkits can help to improve your business in these two areas.
By the myBusiness techblog team
SPRING Singapore has recently released two online tools aimed at providing businesses with knowledge to improve their financial managing skills and customer service levels.
SME Financial Management Toolkit
The SME Financial Management Toolkit is an online financial management tool developed in partnership with SPRING Singapore by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS). It comprises interactive elements that help you determine working capital requirements for business growth and other aspects of your company's financial standing.
By entering certain financial information, you can get a better understanding of your business’ financial standing, cashflow and fund requirements by looking ahead based on the assumptions that you make. There is also a self-diagnostic function to help identify gaps in your financials.
The toolkit is split into six different sections:
- Financial modeling - which provides an instant analysis of business growth and greater understanding of funding
- Business Profiling - a short quiz that enables you to create an instant profile of your business and financial health
- Capabilities Profiling - a quiz that measures your business’ financial management capabilities, and provides a benchmark score to let you see which areas of business you might need to concentrate more on.
- Resource Library - a series of measurements, templates and relevant financial information to aid in business planning, performance measurement, profit and loss, and compliance.
- Learn more - a 1-to-1 clinical session to help ensure that you can make full use of the results of the financial management toolkit (available to the first 100 signups.)
- FAQ and online help - questions and answers to how you can best utilise the financial toolkit
This financial management tool is provided free-of-charge, but one-time registration with a valid email address is required.
Customer Service Toolkit
SPRING Singapore also unveiled a new interactive toolkit developed for SMEs to help develop service excellence. The Customer Service toolkit consists of a self-help portal split into modules that encompass exercises, case studies, tools and worksheets that are illustrated in simulated service scenarios.
You can go through exercises that focus on five key areas of the service excellence framework, namely:
- Leadership - Explore why leadership is important to improving customer service levels, and factors driving customer satisfaction
- Team - Learn how to ensure that service staff keep a positive attitude and focus on providing good customer service
- Culture and communication - Discover how to motivate staff and develop a culture committed to providing good customer service
- Customer relationships - see how important building customer relationships can be, and how exceeding customer expectations can easily build customer loyalty
- Service standards - Learn about Standard Operating Procedures and how service standards can better meet diverse customer requirements
By going through each section and completing checklists in each area, you can better appreciate the importance of each service area, and how they can benefit your organisation. Each area also has a summary that re-caps that area's key points, and a quiz that emphasises the importance of each service area. There is also a progress report that remembers and charts your journey through the toolkit, as well as badges as you complete each section.
Have you already tried out these two toolkits? What do you think about their effectiveness or relevance to your business? Let us know in the comment box below.