Technology is an essential part of every business. Whether you manage a team in an office with computers, printers, and software or run a warehouse with large machinery for moving pallets, you rely on technology to keep your business running efficiently. Technology has revolutionized the way we do business– from marketing to internal processes and beyond.
Unfortunately, many small businesses aren’t using technology to its full potential, leaving you open to bottlenecks. If your online business isn’t effectively using technology, you’re losing valuable time, sales, and even customers. Want to learn the different ways technology can improve your business? You’ve come to the right place. Here are just a few ways you can leverage technology to boost your online business in more ways than one.
Enhance Internal Communication
If you run an online business with partners or employees, you may work remotely from time to time, allowing you to focus on the business rather than the day-to-day office functions. Technology helps improve internal communications for businesses of all types, but especially eCommerce businesses that may have employees across the globe. Now, with communication software like Slack and Zoom, you can communicate with your teams throughout the day without spending time on travel. These applications allow you to increase communication throughout all areas of the business and can help employees become more efficient and collaborative to accomplish more in a single day.
Improve Customer Service
Quality customer service is an important part of every eCommerce business. After all, you have to find some way to communicate with customers who have questions or concerns about your products and services. In the past, email and phone conversations have been the primary method of customer service communications. However, innovations like chatbots and artificial intelligence allow you to effectively serve more customers without having to hire more representatives.
Chatbots are cost-effective in the long run because you won’t have to pay salaries and can instead have your employees focus on other tasks. Of course, since customer service is an essential aspect of every business, you must set up chatbots to function properly and have someone available to answer questions when a bot can’t.
Improve Marketing
Technology and marketing go hand in hand, and as technology evolves, so too does marketing. Companies no longer need to invest thousands of dollars into one snail mail campaign and can instead reach more customers with online marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), social media advertising, and email marketing. Additionally, technology allows you to track the performance of these marketing strategies, allowing you to make adjustments in real-time to support your marketing goals based on real data from real customers. With digital marketing tools, you no longer have to rely on guesswork and can instead collect all the data you need to make better decisions when it comes to your budget.
Reduce Expenses
Technology can drastically reduce expenses in several ways. For example, if you have remote employees, you can save money on office and other overhead costs. Additionally, you can avoid spending money on costly (yet comfortable!) office furniture and computers.
Some technologies also allow you to save money in the long run, even if you haven’t moved from the office to a remote work environment. For example, you can use employee productivity tracking software to see how efficient and productive employees are and use the data you gather to make a plan to increase output.
Additionally, software that allows you to track your expenses can help your business save money by showing you detailed reports on where your money goes, allowing you to formulate a plan to spend less on regular expenses throughout the year. Finance apps can even integrate with your website or sales tools to help you understand more about how much it costs to do business.
Simplifies Project Management
Technology can simplify project management for teams by helping employees understand what tasks are higher priority and how they should be completed. Utilizing time trackers or scheduling software can help your teams accomplish their tasks on time, allowing project managers to track progress and find new ways to motivate employees to manage their time.
Web-based Payments
Online businesses must ensure they’re paying suppliers and vendors on time to receive the best rates. Unfortunately, managing invoices can be difficult if you’re not focused solely on bookkeeping and accounting. Web-based payments can help you keep track of your invoices and payment terms, allowing you to have funds automatically taken out of your business bank account to pay vendors and suppliers. This way, you’ll never have to worry about forgetting to pay your important business partners.
Backup Software
Hackers can attack any online business to gain access to customer data, which can cause security concerns and prevent you from gaining access to that data. A data breach can affect your brand reputation and make customers wary of shopping with you. Using data backup software can prevent you from losing important data that you need to run your business. However, it cannot protect your customer’s data.
Better Security
Since hackers typically attack online businesses to gain access to your customer’s credit card information, you can use technology to protect that valuable information and keep your customers and your reputation safe. With the proper cyber security infrastructure, you can prevent cyber attacks and recover quickly if there’s a data breach. If you’re concerned about your customer’s important data, talk to an IT provider who can help you understand the different ways you can protect your business from cybercriminals.
Improve Personal Productivity
Productivity software can help your teams become more efficient, but as a business owner, you must struggle to stay on top of all the tasks you have to complete in a given day. You can improve personal productivity by hiring virtual assistants from around the world to help you accomplish time-consuming tasks like data entry or appointment scheduling.
Final Thoughts
Leveraging the right technology can boost your online business to make internal processes more efficient, increase employee productivity and engagement, and help streamline every aspect of your business. Through technology, you can eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks to focus on more important business initiatives.
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