How to Use Technology to Create a Long-term View for your Business
Technology can help small businesses with limited capital make their process more productive, effective, and efficient. Then, there's the question: How do you do it?
Have you planned to improve your business process and become more competitive with the help of today's technology and haven't decided yet where to start?
The best way to start is to have a better understanding of how to use existing technology to make your business more productive and competitive.
This article talks about:
The Roles and Importance of Technology in Business
It is a great challenge for businesses to stay ahead of their competitors where there are always quick changes in market dynamics.
Technology plays a significant role for businesses to continue to embrace the challenges of the changing market.
Small business owners can use technology, particularly custom software, in the following aspects of their business:
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Communication
Technology provides businesses different communication tools that they can use to effectively interact and nurture better relationships with their customers and employees at any location.
In business, having effective communication with customers and employees is important to execute business transactions easily and efficiently.
Business communication comes in many forms:
Providing customers real-time updates about their order status and interact with business owners through email, chat, or group messaging to give their reviews, complaints, and queries about the business.
Enabling employees to easily access relevant information, resources, and documents regardless of their location.
Giving employees the chance to effectively collaborate, share their ideas, and monitor their progress through private or group messaging like Slack.
With the use of technology like customer relationship management (CRM) software, businesses can easily build effective and strong relationships with their customers.
Marketing
Marketing your products and services to your target customers is crucial for your business growth.
Technology can help small businesses to effectively and efficiently promote their products and services at less cost with the use of the following:
Social Media. Small business owners can use social media to promote their products and services; and connect, engage, and respond to their customers' concerns.
Websites. Business owners can use their company websites to promote and create online advertising about their products and services.
Email Marketing. Business owners use email marketing software to help them manage and deliver messages to customers effectively and efficiently.
Blogging. Business owners can start to write blogs related to their business and target audience to educate and promote their products and services to their customers.
Tracking and Analytics Software. Software that helps small business owners to keep track of their customers' activities, analyze revenue, engagement, and customer traffic is essential in making decisions on how to improve and leverage their marketing strategies.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. The best way to effectively and efficiently market your business to your target customers is with customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software helps business owners to keep track of what their target customer does, generate leads, and understand customer needs change.
Research
In business, research plays a vital role in your business success and growth. Through research, you can easily understand your customers and their pain points. Business owners can easily access all the valuable resources from the internet to improve and innovate their products and services.
With the use of technology like Google Analytics, business owners can easily track, study, and understand their customers' behavior on their websites that help them decide on how to improve and innovate their products and services offered to satisfy their customers and stay one step ahead of their competitor.
Customer Relationships
Establishing a strong connection with customers is crucial for the growth of your business.
Technology provides businesses different ways to communicate and build strong relationships with their customers. Business owners can:
Respond to customers' inquiries and concerns with the use of social media.
Gather feedback from customers through online surveys.
Handle customer issues through discussion forums and online help desk.
With the use of technology like social media, discussion forums, and customer relationship management (CRM) software, businesses can easily create a consistent and effective interaction with customers like responding properly to their questions and inquiries about the products, updating them with the latest promos, and dealing properly with their concerns and complains. This software enables small business owners to build a good customer relationship and a strong public image.
Security
It is very important for businesses to protect and secure their confidential business and financial information, customer data, decisions, and other business transactions.
With the use of technology, business owners can protect and secure valuable information about their business transactions and processes. Here are some of them:
Use Anti-virus Softwares. Installing the latest anti-virus software helps business owners to protect their computers and networks from possible infections against viruses that lead to possible information loss and damages.
Store Data Online. Storing data online is one of the best ways to protect and secure valuable information about your business. Online storage services provide business owners the capability to preserve and protect business information from possible damages like hardware failure, possible data loss due to disasters like typhoons, fires, and earthquakes.
Use File Encryption Softwares. An effective file encryption software solution can secure business information. It also ensures that business data across devices are protected.
The Principles on How to Use Technology for a Long-term View for your Business
There are different decisions you need to make on how you can use technology to create value and long-term benefits for your business.
The following are some of the principles that you need to consider:
Build a long-term relationship with your Partner
Be customer-centric
Customers are the most important component for your business growth. In upgrading your system, you have to make sure that software enhancements will meet your customers' needs.
Customer involvement in the software development process is essential to ensure that the software project design is based on customers' perspectives. Being customer-centric in the development process, you should consider the following:
Be responsive to customers' ideas and make sure to incorporate their ideas into your system design.
Create a consistent and disciplined approach to track customers' behavior on your system.
Analyze how customers benefit from and respond to new software upgrades.
Make your architecture simple
In agile software development, simplicity matters. It is necessary to create a simplified system architecture to get things done faster, increase capabilities, and reduce maintenance costs.
In upgrading your system, focus on creating simple and flexible architecture that adds value and provides better experiences to your customers. One should design an architecture that:
Focuses on flexibility, scalability, reusability, and a services-based model that supports new strategies, products, and business models.
Consolidates and optimizes data center services and service-oriented architecture to increase efficiencies and lower costs.
Be agile
When implementing technological modernization, it is necessary to create your minimum viable product (MVP) to realize outcomes faster and avoid one-time software delivery or release. This can be done as follows:
Start designing your software update with fewer features.
Divide your system design roadmap into smaller increments.
Release usable functions to a small group of users and get their feedback.
Integrate user's feedback to the next software iteration. Software should be open to changes.
In agile methodology, your MVP undergoes several iterations and working software is delivered by increments. This allows your customers and employees to use, test, and give feedback about your software product earlier.
Consider your business culture and workforce
Introducing technological changes to your employees is quite a challenge. Letting your employees accept and embrace the new technology is not a piece of cake it requires dedication, time, and effort.
In the modernization process, it is critical to consider the kind of culture that you have in your organization and how this modernization affects and be affected by that culture. Encourage your employees to participate in the development process for their ideas to be included in the new technology.
Design for reliability, scalability, and maintainability
Software enhancement is essential for your business to be able to compete in the changing market, meet customer expectations, and improve user experience.
In designing your software project, the following factors should be considered:
Reliability. Software should be able to perform the desired function in a given condition for a specified amount of time.
Scalability. Software is capable to remain stable while adjusting to changes, upgrades, and resource reduction.
Maintainability. Software should be flexible, extensible, maintainable, and reliable.
Flexible software is able to adapt to changing requirements. Extensible software can be expanded from its initial state to adapt to customer needs or new technology. Maintainable software is written in code that is easy to understand so that different developers can upgrade or maintain it. Reliable software is able to function at the expended level of performance and at the expected amount of time.
Build a long-term relationship with your Partner
Adapting technological modernization is a long-term commitment that requires in-depth research. Selecting the right partner and building a long-term relationship with them is essential for your software project's success. Business owners should:
Look for a partner whose values, culture, and leadership are proven trustworthy.
Evaluate the quality of their work based on the technologies that they have built and used.
Build a working relationship with commitment and creative collaboration with your business partner.
Adapting technological modernization provides a great opportunity for your business to attain its long-term goal for business growth and success.
Need to know more about how to use technology to grow your business?