This is an #AGByte so I am going to get straight to the point. In my opinion, these are the 2 most essential tech upgrades that will improve any business regardless of the industry or specific situation.
1. Tech to Improve Your Relationship With Customers (CRM Systems)
Unlike many larger businesses, most small companies live and die with their ability to foster and maintain great relationships with their customers. This is absolutely essential as it is this relationship, this feeling of a personal touch, that allows a smaller company to complete with their larger more established rivals.
Investing in a Customer Relationship Management system is a sure-fire way to gain a huge competitive advantage over most other businesses as it gives you the ability to automate and monitor your customer communications. Basically, they allow you to save time and spot “gaps” which will improve your customer retention, customer satisfaction … and actually sales as well.
2. Tech to Visualize Your Businesses’ Performance (KPI Visualization Tools)
A lot of small business eventually fall into a rut of stagnation because the owner(s) are content with making decisions based purely on instinct. Though this is good to some extent, our “instincts” is really just a manifestation of our knowledge and experience from our subconscious mind.
KPIs (i.e., Key Performance Indicators) are essentially statistics that a business can use as measure of performance for a specific objective over time. KPI visualization tools allow business owners to “feed” their subconscious mind with objective, factual and up to date information about how their business is performing in the areas they care about most.
Having this knowledge in the back of your mind will allow you to significantly improve your decision making, which will result in you making the choices that will positively affect the outcome of your business.