Amazon’s Alexa comes quite handy when you need to know about the nearest cinema, diner or a hospital. But do you know that Alexa can also be useful in improving the day to day operations of your business and assist you in delivering better customer service? Here are a few ways you can use Alexa to boost your business efficiency by just using your voice.
Website Monitoring
The Vigil website monitoring skill for Alexa can allow your AI assistant to report and keep you updated on the status of your online portals. Many small businesses tend to add more sites to provide support to their customers and knowing that they are functioning correctly at all times ensures customers can access those services at any time. Whenever a website goes down, Vigil automatically sends a notification to the moderator so they can fix the problem. The skill can be utilized from home as well, just make sure you are not using it to fix proxy errors for Netflix because it won’t help you with that.
Email Management
Businesses get tones of emails every day and managing them all can be time really consuming. For this, Amazon offers the Astrobot skill that allows Alexa to manage your emails from your Amazon Echo. Through the Astrobot skill, Alexa can easily read, reply and manage all your emails. It can further help you prioritize new ones.
Managing Schedules
When you are running a business you always have so much to do and in such instances, staying on top of your schedule can get really overwhelming. For managing schedules, the FreeBusy Scheduling Assistant allows Alexa to coordinate meetings which ensures that you never miss your appointments. You can check easily the availability of specific individuals using your contacts and perfectly syncing with Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCloud.
Finding Services
Being a small business owner, you have to manage your office yourself and you never know when you might need an electrician, a plumber, a handymen or any other similar service. Thanks to the Intently.co skill, your Alexa can know about more than 1 million service providers. All you have to do then is to ask Alexa for an electrician, and it will promptly connect you with such service providers in your location.
Managing Invoices
Managing invoices can be a hassle, but now if Alexa learns the Accounts Receivable Factoring skill. It allows Alexa to calculate factoring fees and then inform you about the amount you will be getting for your invoices. To make it work, you need to tell Alexa what your factoring rate is and how much your invoice is for.
Collecting Online Store Information
For collecting online store information Amazon offers the Shopify Alexa which provides information on orders, inventory, and store performance summaries. Thanks to the Shopify ecosystem, the mentioned skill brings a wide range of data at your fingertips. All you need to do is to say the word. The Shopify skill includes the summary of best-selling products, list of products that need to be fulfilled, orders and sales reporting and breakdown of store visitors.
Tracking Packages
Small businesses always need to send and receive packages so tracking them becomes really important for seamless functionality. For this, you have the Mail Haven Track Packages skill which allows Alexa to track your packages whether you are sending or receiving them. Alexa will tell you the status of all undelivered packages and also the last update on the package so that you know whether it is still in transit or already delivered. To effectively use this skill you will have to connect to a Mail Haven account.
