There was a time when technology served a complimentary, practical role in most businesses; your laptop is just a tool for you to do work on and servers are just space on which to store work done manually by employees. However, it is more of a convenience than being mission-critical. It’s a cliché, saying that the industry is advancing faster than we can keep up, but the tech sector is. Tech and finance no longer enjoy a mutually exclusive and niche relationship. It’s not all just selling bitcoin online for some lucrative sideline income. Technology is fast dominating all industries across the board.
The disconnect between companies that aim to be early adopters of new technology and those that don’t is evidence of the exponential disparity and disadvantage suffered by businesses that choose to ignore the advances at their disposal. The smart move is to look into some of these burgeoning tech tools. However, not all options are for every company; there does exist a myriad of solutions catering to every imaginable industry.
Table of Contents
Customer Service Bots
There’s no doubting the sheer importance of optimal customer service for your business. Early iterations of chatbots were, for lack of a better term, uselessly stupid. The tech has come a long way, thanks mostly to developments in natural language processing. Your marketing manager will readily tell you that if a client doesn’t receive a response within fifteen minutes, they are likely to be unhappy with your service.
Chatbots can be implemented across the digital presence of your business, from social media to your website. The old ‘a consultant will be with you shortly’ stock response has been replaced with bots that can carry a conversation and draw on your FAQs database to give useful, meaningful answers to customer queries.
Cloud-Based Automation
The term encompasses a broad range of tech utilities. Cloud-based automation allows you to keep entire teams, ranging from small local organisations to a workforce of thousands, on the same page. By keeping track of project management on the grandest scale, it minimises the strain on management and the need for constant communication and reiteration.
Cloud-based automation can report on project performance in such a way as to identify underperforming sectors, deficits and live production costs. It can furthermore be used as a whiteboard for internal communication and allows for tracking individual employee performance. It’s the real definition of ‘business in a box’.
Augmented Reality
Once a science-fiction staple, augmented reality is now a genuine technology entering its post-development phase. Initially developed with entertainment in mind, the ever-improving precision and practicality have seen it find an important place in business, particularly on the engineering and production sectors.
If your business produces anything, there is a way that AR can improve efficiency, precision and production speed. The principle is that AR gives an unobscured view for anyone working in the production line. A digital overlay superimposes precise, real-time specifications, meaning no more referencing designs, and limiting the possibility of human error to the fullest extent possible.
About Carson Derrow
