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One of the advantages of being a small company is that you are more agile and flexible when it comes to facing new challenges. In view of the wave upon wave of technological changes that sometimes render companies and even whole industries obsolete, how can your business ride the wave into the future?

Here are some pointers for making new technology your friend, and not foe:

Overcoming inertia

Many employees and even business processes will understandably be resistant to new technology, due to the lack of familiarity and the need to uproot what have been working so far.

While technology can be immensely helpful in raising work efficiency, a company should not overwhelm its employees by adopting a plethora of new tools all at one go, according to director of marketing systems at Cox Automotive, Rebekah King - who has extensive first-hand experience of helping small businesses to adopt technology.

“We may have a big vision about unifying our client experience, but we get there through putting one foot in front of the other in a very small and practical way,” King said, “And one day you’ll look up after doing that and see that you’ve put together a whole program that is really moving your business forward.” ⁱ

Training will also help to ease your employees into a new way of working. As with learning any new skill, the key is to not pressure them into immediately replicating or even improving their productivity levels upon integration of digital tools.

Sales & marketing

One business area that is often required to keep closely in step with technology is sales and marketing. The digital and social media landscape shifts rapidly and can be difficult to navigate, especially as customers are starting to have a greater say in what they consume.

With the increasing utilisation of data as an asset to minimise business uncertainty, companies like your own can and needs to gain the ability to identify what stage your customers are at in their consumer journey, and engage with them accordingly.

If these sound intimidating to you, fret not - you can gain new insights by attending events like the upcoming NTUC UFLX Forum on 12 July, co-organised by StarHub, where industry leaders will speak about new marketing techniques and how leading edge technologies like AI can help you understand your customers better.

The newfound knowledge will enable you to meet your customers at the relevant touchpoints to enhance your relationship with them.

CRM

In the increasingly data-driven marketplace, customers have raised their expectations of how companies treat them. This is reasonable, as customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help you track customers’ behaviour and personalise communications with them for higher customer satisfaction. The better you can identify your customers as unique individuals, the better you can connect with them. So if you are not using one of these tools, you might be losing out.

Today, there are CRM solutions that are designed and priced for small businesses. They can help you find, win, and keep more customers, and integrate the data for a 360° understanding of your customers. This means that the different business functions of your company can tap into the pertaining pools of information from the database to optimise the value that they create for the customers, from product development to aftersales support.

Distributed teams

CRM solutions, along with the numerous collaborative tools on the market, are possible as a result of the cloud. Cloud storage enables data and software to be hosted online, accessible anytime and anywhere.

This means that not only are tasks and workflows streamlined as employees can collaborate on projects seamlessly and simultaneously, they also no longer have to be in the same office to work as a team. For these reasons, your employees can work with greater productivity and flexibility.

Your company can adopt a transformative workforce model, such as having a remote workforce, in which employees can work outside of the office following their own timetables for maximum fluidity. While this may seem counter-productive, the elevated job satisfaction has been proven to drive work efficiency up, as opposed to employees feeling confined in an office cubicle and clocking in the same number of hours regardless of workload.

Investment in digital tools can reap incredible returns for your business across the entire value chain. New technology may seem daunting at first, but they are here to move your company and employees forward into the future.

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ⁱ https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/11/technology-implementation-small-business.html