In 2018, an increasing number of Australian businesses will adopt technology to solve their business challenges, creating stiff competition in the quest for productivity advantages. If you’re not looking to leverage technology in your business, you risk leaving easy wins on the table for your competitors to collect.
Our message to you? Don’t let tech hold you back! Many Australian SME’s have found themselves in a position where an increase in customer demand is driving their growth, however their business lacks adequate tools and processes to manage the changes. To help you manage the shift, here are the 4 area’s to focus on to find greater productivity:
1. Protect your business
The best way to ensure efficiency is by minimizing the risk of downtime. In 2018, one of the biggest dangers for extensive business disruption is a cyber attack. However, you can establish proactive measures with your IT provider to prevent the chance of your business falling victim.
With cyber attacks on the rise, the best form of protection is still education. Having your staff be able to spot a malicious email can save your business a lot of heart-ache. Cyber criminals are now leveraging social engineering to get your staff to click on dodgy links, however software such as Microsoft’s Advance Threat Protection can help you combat this by only allowing safe links and attachments to arrive in your inboxes.
As a last line of defense, information back ups on the cloud is many businesses fail stop to mitigating both physical and virtual risks. Cloud back ups allow your data to be ‘on call’, where if you become locked out of your business, be it by a hacker or natural disaster, you still have a spare key: your data backup.
2. Scale efficiently
When your business is in stages of exponential growth, it’s important to have the IT capabilities that allow you to expand seamlessly to the increase in demand.
Cloud-based solutions are affordable and secure alternatives to hosting servers in-house. They provide a scalable model which allows you to minimize growing pains of a booming business, as they can be quickly implemented and easily maintained.
If you are considering a cloud migration for your business, learn our expert tips on how to migrate your business to the cloud, successfully, here.
3. Align with your customers
Strong relationships are the foundation to success, and this extends to the relationships you have with your customers. With technology allowing businesses to connect with their customers like never before, it gives you the opportunity to provide experiences which will not only allow you to manage and grow your sales, but it will help you maintain loyal customers, all in a fraction of the time.
Your customers give you a lot of data that you can leverage to anticipate their needs, and expand your business. Business intelligence tools, such as Power BI, allow you to tailor the information you see, and present what you need in easy to interpret graphs.
4. Be mobile
Cloud computing has also allowed the workforce to be increasingly flexible, which has opened up possibilities for your staff to have access to the information in the same way, with the same security, no matter where they are.
The most widely used platform is the Office 365 suite, which not only includes the ever-popular Word and Excel, but productivity powerhouse tools such as Teams and Flow.
No doubt you’ve noticed the trend in the points above – all substantial productivity gains come from implementing the right technology solutions into your business. The intertwining of technology and business was not a 2017 fad, it’s here to stay, and is now an opportunity to grab in 2018.
Learning how to implement the right technologies into your business can be game-changing.
