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One of the keys to growing any business is to ensure you’re doing things as efficiently as possible. If you’re wasting too much time, your business will spend more money than it needs to and not bring in as much revenue as it could. To help improve efficiency and grow your business, one of the best things you can do is upgrade the technology you’re using. With that in mind, here are 6 tech upgrades you should consider adding to your business.
Automation Software
First up, you should consider adding in automation software. Automation software will allow you to automatically perform simple tasks, so that you and your employees can focus on more complicated things. For example, you can use automation software to automatically post to social media, to send out email reminders, or to schedule meetings. These individual tasks may only take a minute each, but when you add them up over the course of a year, it’s a lot of time that you could have spent doing other things.
A Good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool
Next, you’ll want a great CRM to help handle customer relations within your business. A good CRM can track things like customer information, such as the date of their last purchase, how far along they are in the sales cycle, what their business needs are, and much more. This information can then be quickly shared and used amongst different departments, essentially creating a central depository for all your most vital customer information. Without a good CRM, your team will spend too much time trying to coordinate and won’t have the best information available when it comes time to work with prospective or current customers.
Employee Tracking Software
Just like you want to keep track of your customers, you should also keep track of your employees. Get some software that will allow you to monitor things like what each person is working on, their sales numbers for that month, or even the amount of time they take off. For instance, you could get some FMLA software, which would allow you to easily track intermittent employee leave without having to enter it in manually. The better information you have about your employees, the better hiring and firing decisions you can make going forward.
Information Backup
Now that you’re gathering all this important information, you need a way to back it up. You don’t want to come into the office one day to find your computer crashed, and suddenly years of data is lost. One of the best tech upgrades you can make to your business is ensuring there is a system in place to always backup your data. The best way to do this is likely through automatic backups to a cloud storage service. This will ensure that even if something happens to your physical machines – say, a fire in the office – all your information is still safe somewhere.
Customer Service Options
A great tech upgrade you can make is to your customer service options. Customers have different ways they prefer to interact with your business, and the more options you can provide, the happier your customers will be. For example, instead of only offering support via phone, you could also offer it through social media, email, or a Live Chat feature on your website. Then, within these options, you could also offer around the clock support and multilingual support. Finally, you should record the information of all your customer service help, so that if someone reaches out to you again, you have all the information from their previous session right at your fingertips.
Security Upgrades
Finally, you need to make sure everything within your business is safe. This is perhaps the most important tech upgrade you can make. You’ll want to get some software that protects your computer systems, along with software to protect your internet connections. Finally, if you have a physical office, make sure it’s protected with a good security system. Here is a list of common cyber security mistakes that business make to help get you started.
Make the Most of Technology
There are plenty of ways you can upgrade the tech in your business. All you need to do is take some time to consider your own business, think about which areas you could improve, then find a tech solution that will allow you to do so. There are many options out there, so get started now, and watch as technology helps your business to grow for a long time to come.
