Any successful CEO will tell you that incorporating the right technology into your business is critical to its success. Technology can help a company of any size and in any industry grow.
Especially within the past year, businesses worldwide have seen the importance of incorporating technology into their business strategies. As this rapid adoption continues, it will become even more critical to keep up if you want to remain competitive.
Here are four ways that technology can help your business this upcoming year.
1. Strengthen Your Cyber Defense
While most individuals and companies use technology for good, like anything else, there are people who will utilize technology at someone else’s expense.
Industry trends showed that hacking, phishing, and other tech-related crimes were up as much as 27% in 2020. Due to increased remote work worldwide, experts anticipate more small businesses at risk than ever before.
With cyber-crime on the rise, there is no better time than now to fortify your online defenses. This year, you can easily strengthen your cybersecurity using a few different tech-tools.
- Business VPN
- VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are end-to-end encrypted connections between one or more servers. This kind of system allows remote employees to access sensitive data without being exposed to outside connections.
- Commercial Grade Firewall
- It’s essential to have a good firewall to keep your information safe, especially when running a business. Look for a trusted Firewall and Network Security Platform with anti-malware software, intrusion protection, and point-to-point tunneling protocol.
- Password Management Systems
- One of the easiest ways to get hacked is by having a weak password. Using a password management tool can help your IT team keep track of every employees’ password effectiveness. Try using a combination of characters, numbers, upper-case and lowercase letters. Typically, the longer and more unique the password, the harder it will be to break.
This upcoming year, your business should use technology to its advantage to stop cyberattacks from happening.
2. Improves Financial Health
The volatility of 2020 has wreaked havoc across many industries. After the first mass closings, your business may be in a pickle financially. You may still have time to go on the offensive and improve your business’s finances, but you should act quickly.
First, it’s important to get a handle on your current finances. If you are not already using a cloud accounting platform, now is the time to start. Cloud bookkeeping services allow businesses to track all of their financials from almost any device, anywhere. Accounting software will allow you to visualize where your business is losing money and where it can gain money.
Once you understand your financial situation, it is time to gain some capital. Using the funds from an online business loan can provide you with the money you need to pull your business out of financial strife. Taking a business loan out now could help your business get ahead of the second-wave, as thousands of companies were not able to take out a loan earlier this year.
Your business’s financial health will only be as strong as you make it.
3. Provides Excellent Customer Service
One of the biggest benefits of business technology is that it makes providing excellent customer service easier.
Customers today interact with brands on more fronts than ever before. If your technology is insufficient, creating a positive customer experience could be more challenging than it needs to be.
Upgrading your old communication systems is the first step to providing amazing customer service for your business. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few key areas to consider improving:
- Phone System
- Similar to a VPN, using a connected internet phone system will allow your employees, wherever they are, to have a completely secured phone connection, allowing them to provide better service.
- Online Support
- Implementing more touch-points for your customers to communicate with your brand will promote better customer service. On your website, add in live chat support, and provide your customers with an email address that they can contact if they need assistance.
- Survey Tools
- Gauging customer satisfaction using tech has never been easier. Add-on an automated email to go out to any customer who interacts with your brand to see how they felt the experience went.
Customer service is going to be more important as time goes on. Customers today have more choices than before, so if your company is not leading a positive experience, customers may consider looking elsewhere.
4. Easily Create New Marketing Tactics
Reaching new customers should be one of the main goals of a marketing professional. To effectively reach new customers, consider incorporating some MarTech (marketing technology) into the business moving forward.
MarTech can be classified as any tool that combines modern technology with marketing tactics to achieve a task.
Utilizing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) such as Salesforce will allow your business to track how specific marketing campaigns are performing. CRMs give marketers the ability to track customer conversations, log specific data, and even send emails through their program.
As you look for a CRM, make sure that it can integrate with the rest of your business tools used. Switching over to using a CRM will be difficult at first, but the longer you use it, the more useful it will become.
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