Are you looking to use emerging technology to grow your business and scale up? Great, then you’re in the right place.
Without a doubt, technology has changed the world for the better. In fact, we use technology in almost every field of life. It helps us perform our most difficult and time-consuming tasks and has become aligned with our personal and professional goals.
The business world utilises technology particularly well to achieve both B2B and B2C communication, lead generation, growth, and revenue goals. Not to mention the ability of tech to advance past your competitors if you’re on top of it.
If you’re ready to implement technology to move towards your business goals, here are five technologies that every business of today can use to keep up with the changing times.
1 – Computer Networks
Computers were created to make our work easier for us. It goes without saying that every business must have a computing device for each of its employees. But, it’s not just about keeping a few computers in the office, you also need to stand up and secure a network.
Internal networks allow the use of shared resources like common drives, printers and applications, but as business needs change, employees are becoming increasingly mobile and often have multiple devices (phone + laptop). Leveraging deployment solutions that support Mobile Device Management (MDM) will enable you to deploy software and organisational policies to those devices.
2 – Customer Relationship Management Software
Today there is specialist software to solve almost every real-life problem.
Generic software is written with a broad appeal so that every business can take advantage of it, but users may have to work within its constraints. Alternatively, you can have developers write custom software that perfectly accommodates your requirements. One of the most commonly used pieces of software is customer relationship management (CRM) software.
You can find many generic or custom developed business CRMs on the internet. A CRM makes it easy for you to maintain your existing clients while working on landing new ones. You won’t have to remember every minor detail if you are using a CRM, with the easy access for data one of the most valuable benefits.
As a time saving and productivity-boosting tool, using a CRM can help you to decrease the sales cycle and increase customer satisfaction too.
3 – Online Backup
Your company’s data is one of your biggest assets. Losing that data can potentially damage your business and cost you thousands of dollars. You can never be sure when an electronic device may malfunction with your data in it. That’s why it’s the safest bet to keep an online backup of your entire system – both business data and customer data.
With the right internet connection, to a cloud-based service can be all you need to mitigate against disaster.
Sydney business Bins Express believe data backup has saved them money saying:
“The initial cost of backing up your data is offset by the ability to take advantage of existing infrastructure. You don’t need to buy new equipment with each additional customer or client. So your value compounds over time.”
The cloud represents a safe and powerful back-up system that remains connected to the internet for your access, privacy and safety. You can integrate a cloud-based backup system with your business computer network and have all your data automatically stored in the cloud.
4 – Business Class Email
Gmail and Outlook.com are great email service providers, but are best suited for personal use. To ensure your first impression is professional one, your company should have business class email.
For example, instead of “john.smith@gmail.com”, a business email would look like “john.smith@businessname.com”. You can buy these email addresses from business email service providers, or you can buy a domain of your business name with emails.
Getting a website should be one of the first steps of any startup. This site needs a hosting and a domain. From there the technological opportunities are wide and varied, though these can be expensive. For example new software, new hardware, or advanced training. While startups need a lot of funding to meet their technology needs, short term loans may provide the instant capital injection without unnecessary risk.
Short term lenders, Maxiron Capital have the following industry tip to help you reach your technological goals, saying:
“Fixed expenses should be kept as low as possible during the scaling process. You can also take advantage of automated systems to reduce overheads, like accounting or payroll tasks, to make sure your technology is working to guide you to your business goals.”
5 – Biometric Fingerprint Device
Biometric devices make an office environment safer and more punctual.
A biometric authentication can be logged to automatically keep track of employees’ work hours. Every time they enter the office, they could provide a thumb to a fingerprint reader and once again when leaving. This configuration benefits you as a business owner by providing an accurate representation of their exact time of arrival and departure.
This makes it easy for you to calculate their punctuality and as a result, their salaries. You can also integrate this technology with a custom made software and have their wages automatically calculated according to their working hours.
This is an efficient system according to Sydney SEO experts Search It Local who have increased productivity through automation, saying:
“The major benefit of advances in tech like the biometric fingerprint scanning is efficiency. With less time wasted in menial tasks associated with timing, employees are freed up to focus on actual business outcomes. By automating time tracking we increased ticket resolution times by 7%.”
This also keeps unauthorised individuals out of the office or a part of the office. Usually, these biometric devices are attached to a door. The door only opens when an authorized person provides his fingerprint impression.
