When you walk into any business today, you see technology in action. Whether it’s leading the show or in the background, the establishment’s owners could not run their days without the help of some form of tech.
This shift to a tech-centered world may have come on gradually compared to life a decade or more ago, but it’s evolving quickly. Technology's role is changing, and you need to keep up if you’re running a business operation and want to be competitive.
From marketing to sales to project management, tech is an integral part of the day-to-day workflow in almost every company. What role does it play in general business operations? We’ll explain the importance of getting more than passingly comfortable with tech in your job here.
How do your clients find out about your products or services? How do you hire, instruct, and monitor your team? How do you place orders or negotiate sales with vendors?
The answer is communication, and for most of these exchanges, we’re not talking about phone calls or in-person discussions.
Technology has streamlined how we communicate, eliminating the need to spend much of our once-wasted time sitting on the phone waiting for someone to answer or respond to incoming calls. If your business is set up right, your clients should be able to find most of their basic answers on your website, by email, or through a chat feature. This frees your team to work on crucial work, like customer service and project management.
Gone are the days of waiting to order “that must-have thing” you just realized you needed. Instead, you can search for it in your browser, order instantly, and have it shipped within a few days. Grocery shopping is as easy as adding everything to your online cart and having it delivered to your door.
It’s no wonder that today, global e-commerce is a $4.12 trillion industry. If you’re not advertising and selling online, you’re missing a chunk of that figure.
Even if you have little to no experience setting up a website, you can find plenty of legitimate experts who will create and run it for you. When done right, the profit can outweigh the expense. With so many people preferring to shop online, your market could be limitless.
Keeping track of sales and accepting payments has moved from cash, check, or credit cards to credit cards or digital payments like ApplePay or PayPal. Recurring payments are easily managed with retainer management software. (For more on this subject, check out Accelo's explanation of this software’s benefits.)
If you have an online computer or phone that contains any of your business data, you need cybersecurity. Cybercriminals continue to get sneakier, using increasingly realistic phishing schemes and methods to breach your security to access sensitive data.
Federal cybersecurity rules hold you, the business owner, responsible for any data breach caused by negligent security. Most of our information is on the cloud, making regular updates of your security measures an integral part of your processes.
Every device that accesses your business’s data should be protected. Consider investing in cybersecurity insurance to give you even more peace of mind against breaches and other cybercrimes.
As different as it all looks when you consider it piecemeal, technology’s role in business operations really has one common goal: to make our lives easier. Instant calculators perform math operations so we don’t have to think or worry about human error. Customer service management software minimizes the need for extra work, automating many of your repetitive tasks.
From template creation to contract signing, nearly everything can be completed online. For many general business operations, borders are no longer an issue. This increased efficiency makes day-to-day life easier, whether you notice it or not.
Think about taking your next sale without the help of a computer or doing your Christmas shopping without any technology involved. Every step of the process would take more time. As a business owner, unnecessary time spent equates to money lost.
The more you embrace technology in your daily workflow, the more efficiently your business can run. Where are you noticing delays in progress? How could tech help eliminate those clogs? The initial investment in monetary and training costs could quickly become a profit.
Whether you love or hate it, the reality is that technology is too far advanced for us to return to life before machine learning and artificial intelligence. Instead of fighting it, consider welcoming technology into your business anywhere it seems prudent. Like our cell phones, TVs, and computers, you may soon realize you don’t know what you’d do without your new “gadget.”
