Technology has changed the workplace rapidly in recent decades, bringing with it the promise of greater efficiency, but if you aren’t careful, it can feel as though it brings more work and headaches rather than fewer. The key is to choose the right tech for the job that you need done. One way to approach this is by looking at certain key areas and how you can make improvements.
Customer Service
Technology can help you serve your customers better by identifying the ones who have more complex questions and directing them to the people who can best assist them. Artificial intelligence can answer simpler questions. Apps can also be an excellent way to deliver your products or services to your customers more effectively.
Compliance
In certain industries, there are a number of compliance standards that must be met. Tracking and ensuring compliance can be complex and costly. Depending on what industry you are in, there may be technological solutions to make this easier. If you work in fleet management, Samsara’s telematic solutions go beyond GPS tracking and offer extensive information about driver behavior and the fleet that can not only help with compliance but can also increase efficiency and safety and save money.
Marketing
Two of the biggest tech-related changes to marketing in the last couple of decades have been the rise of social media marketing and the increase in the amount of data that you can gather and analyze about your customers. Social media marketing should be part of an overall digital marketing strategy. With a savvy approach that encourages engagement, you can tailor your marketing strategy to your niche and raise your profile in a cost-effective way. As for data, thanks to the level of analysis that can be done on an enormous volume of data, you can get far more accurate and granular information than ever before about the preferences and behavior of your customers.
Productivity
There are a number of tools that can help you increase your own productivity or that can increase the productivity of your staff. There are tools that people can use to track how much time they spend on various tasks or to help keep them on task. You can also productivity tools to track employee activity, but you may find it more helpful to use these in a collaborative way, to identify bottlenecks or other issues with your processes, rather than a punitive one. While you can use tracking and productivity tools to find out what your employees are doing and require them to work at a higher pace or use their time more efficiently, in the long term, you may struggle with staff morale and retention. A better approach would be to use any data gathered in this way transparently and to problem solve.
Flexibility
These days, a modern, successful workplace needs to be flexible, and technology can help ensure that happens. This includes the ability to recruit top talent to work remotely and to convene meetings without the costs of flying people to distant locations. Tech also means that it’s much easier to react quickly to fast changing conditions, but you do need to make sure that you and your employees have down time to avoid burnout.
