There are a lot of stories now of many businesses that are experiencing a boost in sales and publicity all because of technology and the same can be said for businesses who have closed because of technology related reasons.
The question now is, What do you with technology as a business-owner?
Many business owners in underdeveloped countries have been underrating technology and its usefulness in life and business.
In Nigeria, Onitsha to be exact, there’s a high intolerance for anything tech. It’s almost seen as a lazy approach to life. Many businesses avoid using technology stating reasons such as, “My people don’t use WhatsApp”, but in this article we want to look into the full benefits and areas that can be improved in a business using technology.
Here are 7 ways technology has improved your business
1. The Way you Communicate with Customers and Business Partners:
Communication and the sharing of information are critical for every business. Today’s environment offers more ways than ever, and the technology available makes it faster, easier, and more efficient.
With applications like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, social media platforms, chatbots, and more being leveraged daily, there are pros and cons for all of us.
Sales enablement provides the ability to track buyer-seller conversations and receive analytics based on user behaviors. Deeper intelligence makes it easy to obtain customer information and use it to enhance the customer experience.
Communication is effective when technology digs into customer information to help us create personalized messaging. Automated communications using a variety of channels help businesses boost marketing productivity and reach customers, as well.
But we need to be mindful that, taken too far, we could lose the ability to build customer relationships—and lose the human touch in our brands.
2. Enabling of Remote Working:
Although remote work has grown steadily over the past 15 years, Covid-19 forced companies not already promoting a remote work environment to make the transition more quickly than expected. And it’s likely a good thing that is here to stay:
Companies of all types—private, public, nonprofit, or startup—continue to recognize the bottom-line benefits of integrating remote work into their business strategies,” said Sara Sutton, founder and CEO of FlexJobs.
“With improvements to technology and increasing demands from employees in a tight labor market, we fully expect to see the momentum around this important workplace continue to grow,” Sutton concluded.
Companies had to pivot quickly to ensure their teams had access to the right technology and infrastructure to support remote log-ins, the bandwidth to handle video conferencing, and project management tools so that teams could continue to work on projects and update status together.
Instead of managing by hours spent in the office, leads had to shift to measuring employee output. There’ve been a lot of benefits to this new normal. Not only is it easier to attract and retain talent, but it’s also increased productivity.
One interesting two-year Stanford study showed an incredible productivity boost among remote workers equivalent to a full day’s work each week!
And there’s more; it’s saved high costs in real estate, cut back on carbon emissions, and makes companies more agile and scalable.
3. Decreasing Cost/Increasing Functionality:
Two things have come together to create a “buyer’s market” when it comes to software solutions for your business. First, the hardware and software necessary to develop these software solutions have become increasingly easy to use and afford.
Secondly, the number of tech-savvy and entrepreneurial minds who can exploit such crumbling barriers has multiplied exponentially. A back-end inventory system that once took a multi-million-dollar company a year to create in the not-too-distant past takes a couple of weeks for a few recent college graduates to put together.
These solutions are offered at affordable rates and are often simple enough to use that businesses don’t need to hire dedicated employees or sign long-term service contracts to make use of them.
Conclusion:
From the above points, you can clearly see that technology can be both a tool for growth and cause for business failure.
When ignored, your competitors can capitalize on your lack of investment in tech and attract many of your target customers and leave you in the dust.
You might not be able to fully tap into tech for your business but you need to focus on aspect and begin to grow from there. You could start from the communication technology used in your business and create a unique selling proposition for your business.
From here you can expand to more aspects of your business.
