Read on to discover five key areas where businesses should leverage technology to maximize benefits and boost efficiencies, security, and the bottom line.
Technology has fused itself into nearly every corner of running a business—for a good reason. In many ways, it helps us scale, adapt, and work faster and more efficiently than ever before. Technology is likely right by your side whether you work in IT, security, accounting, or sales.
That being said, there are hundreds of ways to implement technology incorrectly. Overreliance on technology over humans lacks nuance and emotion; eschewing technology and only using human workers can open up more room for error and spend unnecessary time on slower processes. It’s about finding the right balance between the two in the disciplines best suited to leverage technology.
There are five key areas where businesses can best leverage technology to maximize the benefits they receive.
Leverage cloud-based infrastructure and management
One of the most obvious—and thus common—areas to leverage technology is through infrastructure with the cloud-based model. With technology that makes on-prem solutions virtually irrelevant to modern business, cloud-based infrastructure is huge for any business, especially with SaaS transformation and a SaaS delivery model.
Cloud technology can be stretched and molded to your business’s requirements and needs. It supports multi-tenancy, cross-functional collaboration, and seamless migration from whatever on-prem setup you come from.
Applications can be developed off of cloud-based infrastructure and sold to companies and individuals across the globe. A resilient architecture can be set up to support any current needs and future potential needs and risks as well. One of the biggest complaints about on-prem models is that they are either impossible or costly to update and slow to catch up with modern trends. That’s not the case with a cloud-based solution, especially if you create a solid architecture to support it.
Transitioning to a cloud-based model can be intimidating because it affects every corner of the business, not just a specific function or team. There are consultancies that exist to support businesses with this same task, and their processes can help make the process easier and improve future scalability chances for the company as it scales.
Leverage advanced mobile payment capability
If you run a business with in-person or online payments from individual consumers, you likely need help with the complexities of payments and returns. You’ve had to decide whether or not you want to run a cashless business, how many card types you can afford to support, and so on.
Implementing mobile payment systems will solve a lot of those problems for you. Not only will it be more convenient and secure for your customers, but it also saves a lot of time on the business’ end with automatic bookkeeping, seamless transaction processing, and support for any transactions made outside of your main business. For example, if you set up a booth at a local art show or conference, you can take your payment system with you with no change in process or experience.
Leverage AI-powered touchless entry for security
This has been a concern for many years but was a huge focus for many businesses during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging technology by going touchless became more critical than ever when businesses wanted to return to the office but keep their employees as safe as possible.
By using AI-powered touchless access and hands-free entry solutions—including facial authentication—businesses can improve the accuracy, speed, and ease of controlled buildings and facilities. This technology can help prevent those who try to sneak into a building when an actual employee has used their ID badge; they can track and take note of any unknown visitor to a building.
Leverage fully digital phone systems for customer support
VoIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, is quickly becoming a necessity for businesses, not a nice to have. Existing landlines and large call centers are falling out of favor compared to implementing a solid VoIP solution. If you’ve heard of an online phone system or a cloud-based system, you’ve heard of VoIP.
VoIP is a huge money saver because it’s easier to scale, and you don’t need hundreds to thousands of physical phone lines to run it. Support center employees can take their work on the go, and advanced features like round-robin routing, auto dialing, and call monitoring (especially when training new employees) make the entire customer experience smoother on both ends of the call.
Big data visualization
It’s no surprise that analytics and data teams have a history of spending hours and hours pulling together data dashboards, analytics, and more multiple times a year. Especially with the advent and use of big data in the last decade or so, that data becomes harder to manage—and it gets even harder the larger the company is.
Data visualization is key to not only organizing all of that data in an understandable, easily digestible way but it also saving your business hundreds of hours by giving that time back to the analysts and data teams. Instead of spending all of that time pulling the data, it can now be better spent analyzing the existing data and making impactful changes based on it. This helps businesses scale and grow even faster than they could have before. And if your business has the opportunity to combine big data visualization with artificial intelligence, you’ll be able to move and adapt with zero effort.
