The new generation is now fully-fledged and involved in the latest technology and gadgets. You might have a startup idea in mind or already have an existing small scale or a medium scale business (SMB) running. This blog is the best choice to know how and where to apply some interesting newbie technologies in your business.
“Sales”, is the most important factor that equally stays along with “service”. When you have a company or business that provides some industry required products or services, you want the business to grow to the next level with a good amount of sales. Being an SMB or a startup revenue is essential to eventually get back your amount invested in it through quality sales.
Apart from enhancing the sales and profit for a business, regardless of the size of the company, the application of technology greatly improves the environment at the workplace making it more to the point and organized. Let’s learn more about them in the coming paragraphs.
Productive Workplace
For better sales, you need an exceedingly well-performing resource base, i.e.; the human resources. This is one important aspect that decides the quality and efficiency of the products or services offered by the company. Let us have a closer look at some key technological applications you must employ in your business.
Time Tracking Application
Punctuality is a quality habit we have been trained since childhood. This has great importance when it comes to timely serving your customers with your products/ services. A Time tracking application comes in helpful to analyse the time dedicated to each area of work and ideally rearrange the timings according to the priority of work. This will aid in saving more time in unwanted or least important sections and ideally use that time to work better on high priority areas of work. Some easy examples to know the working of time management applications is systems that track your in-and-out entries at the office or even the login-logout systems installed on your computer device.
Analytical Tools
When you have a website or a shop, installing an analytical tool helps in tracking insights on how well your website performs or the sales at your shop, respectively. These insights can be readily used in making changes to your business strategies to improve business productivity.
Task Management Application
When a small business and it’s just a small number of employees it is easy to manage the tasks. But as the business improves and it gets busy, you being the business owner might not have enough time to dedicate enough time to look into the tasks of the employees. A task management tool comes in handy here. You can easily get a hand over all the tasks and add tasks and tag the employees on the same platform. Some most trending task management platforms are Asana, Slack and Trello.
Last-mile delivery companies and warehouses can also install a delivery management software and logistics management software, respectively to manage their orders and stocks.
New Marketing Strategies
Whether you have a brick-and-mortar business or an online business or a combined one, you need a good marketing platform to reach your audience. Branding your product requires the public to be well informed about your products/ services. Marketing strategies for branding has come a long way from hoardings and banners to online ads and social media presence.
Yes, you heard that right! Social media platforms including the most popular ones like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and many more, is the best platform to easily get your brand out there to your targeted audience online. Online advertisements are another way to easily market or business online via search engines and social media websites.
Easier Communication
Communication has advanced a lot in recent years making it simple to connect anyone from any part of the world. Online applications such as Whatsapp, Skype, Zoom, etc all help in easily connecting to people online to charge up the spirit of teamwork. Nowadays such software, aid in easily managing meeting online for client calls or internal calls such as teleconferencing or video conferencing.
Improve Customer Service
Customer satisfaction is another factor that affects your business growth. Satisfied customers are directly proportional to greater revenue from them repurchasing/ reordering and even new customers coming from recommendations and the good reviews and ratings that your business has online. Hence, it is essential to always be closely acquainted with your customers via emails, notifications and chat support.
Replying to the comments on different platforms is another great way to engage customers and create the image that the company provides customer-oriented services.
Email Management
Sending out regular newsletters to subscribed customers is one way to keep your customers updated about the product updates or your newly launched products and services.
You can also send out notifications regarding the customer’s buy and asking them for feedback and keeping in touch to enquire the performance of the products to keep up a quality communication between the client and customer.
Chat Services/ Chatbots
Another most raging customer service application that you can employ on your website is a chat service application such as Tawk.to, LiveChat, Clickdesk, Zendesk, etc. The platform can be either managed manually by customer service representatives or even a pre-defined chatbot programmed to answer the frequently asked questions according to a pre-prepared script.
Safe and Secure Networks
Identity theft is increasing online which is why you must secure your network to keep up to the privacy of your customers. There are times where you get messages on your phone regarding a similar search or enquiry you did online. Those are signs where your contact details have been compromised for targeted marketing.
Apart from identity privacy, as part of the digitalization campaign going viral, cash transactions online must also be safe where your saved card details are secured to not be used by any stranger to drawing away finances. Such situations make it inevitable to secure your website with website security applications and safe payment gateway features.
Improve Website Quality
This is the age of “everything online” with hundreds and thousands of websites going live on the internet every day. This increases the competition on how your website will rank better than your competitors. Applying proper SEO strategies and increasing the quality of the content on the website will aid in creating a better result in search results compared to paid online advertisements. Hence, investing in a good content management software script that you can customize according to your business requirements must be considered.
Now that you have an idea on the areas to apply technology in your business, let us now look into a checklist of how to select the right software applications for your business or company.
Select the Right Technology for your Business
- Focus on the Issues: Focus on the problematic areas in your business using the insights generated by the time management software and analytical tools installed for the business.
- Apply Measures as per Business Requirements: Talk to the team and follow overall performance using the task management software installed. This will let you have an idea on what technologies that are to be installed including the suggestions provided by the employees and even the customers.
- Keep Note of your Budget: Another point to put into attention is your budget. Being a startup or an SMB might limit your financial assets to splurge on such technologies to improve the workplace and business. Look into the most important and unavoidable areas that require technology and give it a priority while purchasing.
- Understand the Skillset present or required: Always have an idea on the skill set of the employees before installing the software. It is a good habit to conduct short sessions or seminars introducing the software to the team and arrange sessions for portions that the team lack in skill.
Now, there you have a complete checklist on how and where to use technology in your business.
