Technology is one of the defining factors for successful businesses in 2022. Most business leaders agree that implementing modern tech solutions is not just a nice-to-have anymore – it is more or less crucial to the success of a company. This is because any company that doesn’t use leverage technology can be sure that their competitors are leveraging technology – and so they will certainly be falling behind the competition. When we spoke to an IT support provider London businesses have been relying on for more than a decade, they told us that digital transformation, and the modernization of their IT, is a priority for many of their customers.
Technology for Small Businesses
Small businesses often have to contend with the fact that they have much larger, and perhaps more established competitors in the same market as them. This can be a challenge, because although small businesses have many advantages over their larger competitors (such as better agility, and better customer relations), a lack of resources can put them on the back foot.
However, small businesses are finding lots of new ways to bridge the gap between themselves and their larger competition. For instance, the majority of outsourced IT support London based IT companies provide is aimed at small businesses – because outsourcing your IT is a great way to free up time and resources that would be better spent on core business goals. If your business uses Microsoft apps then you should look at using a Microsoft Partner – you could lean on the support of this expert Office 365 Company to help ensure your Microsoft apps and your chosen tools work best for your business.
What Technologies Should Small Businesses Consider?
There are lots of different kinds of technologies that small businesses can use to make certain processes and responsibilities easier to complete and therefore make themselves more productive. Below are 5 valuable technologies for SMBs to consider:
- Project Management Solutions
Small businesses are often juggling a lot of projects at once, and so anything that can make managing work more efficient will be hugely useful. Thankfully, there are lots of great project management solutions out there for this. Below are some examples of project management solutions:
- Trello – a Kanban-style project management system, Trello condenses all of your projects into a single view. It splits projects into columns, and within each column, you have cards representing different tasks – you can create subtasks on a card, as well as attach files and links to them. This is a great way to organize your tasks and get a bird’s eye view of all of your work.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
One of the biggest challenges any business can face is having an inefficient system for managing leads, tracking progress on sales, and nurturing customer relationships. As the name suggests, this is precisely what Customer Relationship Management solutions are designed to simplify. These types of software centralize all the data and tools pertaining to your customers. It is also a great way for marketing and sales departments to collaborate and establish workflows, which can make acquiring leads and converting them into sales easier. After-sale care is also optimized with CRM.
- Unified Communications
Unified communications refers to any platform that combines all the channels of communication a business uses into one interface – this could include instant messaging, videoconferencing, telephony, and email. The challenge larger businesses have is that communication can be protracted, due to the size and complexity of the organization – this is a huge advantage small businesses have, and they can maximize their advantage by leveraging unified communication.
- Backup & Disaster Recovery Solutions
The last thing any business wants is to lose their data due to an incident such as a cyber attack or some other disaster (such as fires or flooding in the workplace – while unlikely, these things do happen). Major data loss can be especially crippling for a small business, so having a robust and agile backup solution is valuable. Cloud storage is an easy way for businesses to make data backup easy.
Disaster Recovery is another important technology solution that goes hand-in-hand with backup services. DR is the practice of restoring data and business processes after an incident – this usually involves the assistance of an IT support provider. The idea is that a business should be able to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.
In today’s era, where cyber attacks becoming increasingly common, backup and disaster recovery is extremely valuable.