When you launch a new company, it’s natural to look for the technologies that offer the quickest bang for buck—technologies that allow your business to hit the ground running, as affordably as possible.
But what happens when your business starts to grow, and you need technologies to keep up with your evolution? Cheapest and quickest aren’t always the best solutions. In fact, scaling depends on sustainability and efficiency.
With that said, you can adapt your tech strategy to offer maximum scalability for your evolving business. Here are a few tips to point you in the right direction.
Make Use of Machine Learning
Machine learning platforms can help your business to perform simple and repeatable tasks—which could include anything from billing and invoicing to purchasing, manufacturing assembly, and beyond.
Basically, machine learning will look at historic performance data to “learn” what needs to be done, and then to perform accordingly. The benefit here is that you don’t have to hire new team members to handle these often-mundane tasks—and the employees you do have on board can focus their efforts on good, creative work that adds real value to the company.
Use Tech in the Onboarding Process
Another step you can take is to introduce technology into your onboarding process—which can help to streamline things and remove some day-to-day grunt work from your HR professionals. Again, the aim is to free your employees to focus on more creative and value-adding activities.
Technology can streamline the onboarding process in a number of ways. Apps can allow new hires to complete their paperwork quickly and easily. They can provide glimpses into the company culture, and create first-day agendas to allow new hires to hit the ground running. And of course, they can also provide training programs.
There are even some HR apps out there that will allow you to automatically add new hires to Slack channels, Dropbox folders, email lists, or whatever else—all of which can make life much less harried for your hiring managers.
Implement Tech That Aids Client Relationships
Technology can also be a powerful way to ensure smooth relationships with clients—something that proves challenging as the company grows and the client list gets longer.
The obvious example here is CRM, or client relationship management software, which can help you keep track of important details about each client. Always have a record of past orders, past conversations, and so on, ensuring that you can approach each of your important customers with the right information in hand.
CRM and other technologies can empower your sales and customer service professionals to thrive—which in turn helps your business prosper!
Allow Chatbots to Serve Client Needs
And speaking of customer service, one final idea is to implement chatbots, which can help you to dramatically reduce your customer service times.
These automated programs can be configured to answer customer questions without the need for a “live” person to intervene—and when a customer service representative is needed, the chatbot can triage inquiries to the right departments.
The bottom line about chatbots is that they help you keep your customers happy, and without adding more work to your customer service department.
Use the Right Tech Strategy to Scale Your Business
As your company matures, your approach to technology should adapt in kind—and these brief technological tips can get you started.
At Salient Networks, we take pleasure in helping small and medium-sized companies leverage tech effectively—and we’d love to talk with you about your business technology strategy. Contact Salient Networks today to begin that conversation.