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Planning for 2020: Leveraging technology to alleviate basic business woes

Use modern technology to improve daily business activities. Many medium-sized and small businesses are tapping into the new technology to help them come up with a more innovative, more efficient, and more productive workforce. Similarly, the rise in remote workers has led to an increase in the demand for on-demand data. Below are ways that technology can help you increase efficiency in your business.

Using the right technology

Ensure that your business utilises the appropriate technology to increase its productivity. Depending on how you use technology, it can build or destroy your business. Therefore, evaluate your business and come up with areas that need a boost in productivity and conduct research on the right technology to employ to realise the results.

Automate

Research and come up with the tools that will aid in the automation process. Use tools that will help you from bill paying and scheduling to updating your contact list and responding to customers’ emails. Similarly, find the technology that will help you in digitising the manual production processes to increase efficiency and minimise losses.

Additionally, you can train your workforce to use these technologies to ensure maximum production.

Password Management

When you have a password or manual logging into the system, phase them out and replace them with biometric authentication. Ensure that you manage the business passwords and data well by installing and regularly updating the security software. 

 The issuance of passwords in the process of production is both financially and operationally costly. You can manage the business credentials in any device by using tools such as 1Password and Google Cloud Security to track all your passwords from external threats.

Also Read: 7 ways to build a successful digital business

Collaboration

Although collaboration is vital in business, your employees should not be enclosed in a room to achieve it. Your remotely working staff members can share documents and collaborate easily using free applications from Google’s range of cloud products. You can use customer cloud solutions to solve your production problems and secure sensitive data. 

Your business can use Unified Communications systems that offer various worker interactions such as phone calls, video chatting, conferencing, or sending instant messages.

Additionally, your workers can use Customer Relationship systems such as Insightly, Zoho, or Salesforce to keep track of their engagement with prospects and store them in one location. When you use these systems, the consistency in prospect relations will be boosted, thus increasing profitability and productivity.

Organisation

Often, a lot of time can get wasted in searching for vital information stored in large sets of data. These data frequently get accessed through one device. When you invest in the database system, you will enable your employees to access and add any vital data easily. Your remotely working employees can use ClickTime to keep track of their expenses, mileage, and working hours.

 Employing such technology will help you in keeping your critical data accurately in one place. When implemented, your clients, employees, and managers will be productive, well-informed, and compliant.

Also Read: 2020 ready: Smart investments to help your business grow

Ease of access

Provide your remote workers with the support solutions and the updated mobile devices to ensure that they are well-connected throughout. You can think of investing in a phone solution with service providers to ensure that all your employees stay connected.

Similarly, use worker caller ID, softphones, find-me-follow-me, and voicemail to email features to ensure that your employees maintain professionalism and never miss any business opportunity with a client.

Employ virtualisation

When your business has old desktops, you can extend their lifespans through virtualisation of their operating systems to offsite servers. Conducting this will help you reduce the cost of capital expenditure, and hardware maintenance as the regular updates and the cost of service upkeep will get minimised.

When your business is already practicing redundancy, you can add your phone system to save more costs. You should task yourself with managing your office. Ensure that your employees get focussed on their jobs. Similarly, source anything that is outside the scope of your expertise and trust the hired experts to do their jobs. Use the appropriate technology and watch your business increase its productivity.

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