The most obvious benefit of a technology advance is that it increases your profits. You increase profits by increasing sales (without spending more to generate those sales) or reducing your costs. When evaluating new technology solutions, look at their impact on your sales and spending.
For example, technology that makes it easier for customers to buy from you, such as an e-commerce solution and various payment apps, will likely increase sales. Social media sites are born and die on a monthly basis, requiring marketing departments to adopt those your customers and potential customers use.
You can reduce your labor costs by automating certain functions, such as using employee training software or adding more options to your phone answering service.
Thanks to the many easy-to-learn, easy-to-use social media and marketing platforms, you can increase your marketing communications (marcom) activities, often for free. Using keyword search technology, you can help boost your website’s rank in search engines. Purchasing affordable video cameras will help you offer live product demonstrations on your website or YouTube channel. Using blast email and text programs, you can increase your messaging distribution with these often free technology advantages.
When customers are happy, they buy more and return fewer purchases. Using technology that helps customers find information 24/7 improves customer satisfaction. You can provide them with online written or video instructions and FAQ pages to improve communication with them.
If you can print mailing labels at your office, you won’t have to go to the post office to ship packages, allowing you to offer same-day shipping on after-morning orders, depending on when your mail carrier comes each day.
Technology is a key part of the job placement, applicant review, onboarding and training tasks of HR departments. The more you can perform HR tasks with technology, the more quickly they get done and the less chance there is that you make an error that can end up in a lost hire, employee departure or lawsuit. Training employees on your company policies and benefits enrollment, for example, ensures accurate paperwork gets filed and less time is spent bringing new employees up to speed.
It’s almost impossible for employees, vendors, customers and other stakeholders to be unable to communicate thanks to the myriad communications technologies available. Using phone calls, texts, emails, blog posts, website home page updates, podcasts, apps, videos and social media posts, you can keep in touch with people around the clock.
Even small businesses with only a few employees need accurate accounting, which can require documents such as a balance sheet, cash flow statement, annual budget, P&L statement, accounts receivable and payables aging, and a general ledger. Using individual Excel spreadsheets was a godsend for many small-business owners when it debuted. Today, small-business accounting programs like QuickBooks, FreshBooks and Peachtree provide more robust features and streamline your bookkeeping by tying your different documents together for accuracy.
Guest Editorial