The most significant factor to assess business productivity is its ability to execute the overall strategy. However, businesses also need proper employee engagement to ensure that everyone is on the same page. And for that reason, implementing next-gen automated technology is the need of the hour to transform the operations. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, AR/VR, Big Data, IoT, Blockchain, Chatbots are some names that can enhance the workplace functions.

Leaders and managers can often feel the brunt of these changes as they need to frequently update the work environment to keep it profitable in the long run. Investing in these disruptive technologies like custom chatbot development provides enough evidence in improving customer service and streamlining various operations.

Leveraging Automation and Intelligence to Enhance Productivity

Tracking employee productivity is more accessible now for the managers due to increased mobility. Plus, data intelligence has emerged as an excellent tool for enhancing the process of storing and analyzing vast amounts of data. Here’s how companies can leverage new technologies:

Automated Processes

They can focus more on crucial aspects like resource accessibility, workforce skills, consumer markets, and quality of infrastructure. Automated processes of international shipments, deliveries, and payments have significantly lowered the costs of coordinating with different teams. Digital platforms now connect sellers with buyers that help in creating sophisticated networks of global marketplaces. Data crunching is the biggest challenge for businesses due to the smart connectivity of devices across each segment. IoT and Big Data have generated massive volumes of data that need to be gathered and analyzed.

Planning Resource Utilization

Robots have already entered the technology arena and are now delivering goods to customers with robotic shuttle systems. The most significant benefit of such systems is that they have higher storage capacity and flexibility because of their dynamically free movement. Different kinds of blockchain development services deliver different transparencies. A public one can also benefit other societal functions like elections. End-to-end user interaction also becomes transparent as any alteration in the data would require each participant’s approval to change a single transaction. Feature engineering is massively influenced by the generation of hypotheses that can help marketers in developing distinct and user-friendly features. It can further disintegrate into creating new features or transforming the existing ones.

Communication Across Infrastructure

Businesses today have many branches located at different locations that require constant communication through an integrated infrastructure. Moreover, all the data needs to be stored in safe and collaborative storage to maintain a sophisticated architecture. The cloud services pose as an excellent solution for facing such challenges. For configuring those, they can either use one model for forecasting or utilize them in boosting their productivity levels. Various industries can bank upon the opportunity to develop self-learning solutions like Machine Learning in banking, healthcare, education, gaming, among others. Data mining is another essential task that enables marketers to discover patterns that usually go unnoticed. It assists them in storing data, maintaining data, and analyzing the connections with different data streams.

Enhanced Marketing Efforts

If there is any mistake, marketers can quickly figure out who made it and when, with the technology. It also allows them to recognize that traffic from people is from real customers instead of bot activities. Smart contracts are a unique way of executing an official agreement between participants, with an embedded code of terms for all parties. Such a contract and its terms are decentralized that ensure each party agrees to do what they expect. IoT is a significant enhancement for the supply chain by decreasing costs and avoiding risks. The transport vehicles like cargo, ships, trains, cabs, of such companies have in-built sensors connected to an alarm system for tracking and monitoring their real-time location.

Final Thoughts

Only humans can train algorithms, their experiences, mistakes, and success. And for this, businesses today need to integrate technology in their daily operations to ensure they are harnessing the highest potential of the innovation available to them. As the data processing prowess increases, the role of machine learning is going to play a vital role in helping businesses make crucial decisions. WeCode – www.wecode-inc.com has a team of expert and experienced developers who develop self-learning solutions with services like NLP and DL algorithms that can replicate human decision-making capabilities. Services like data visualization, text, data, and image analysis enhance the productivity levels by automating each of your business processes.

Small businesses come in all sizes and shapes. Some take the form of mom-and-pop convenience stores while others nationwide present family business. Some are made up of two founders who work out of a garage while some others have hundreds of employees working in an organized setup.

But, there is one thing which unites all sizes and types of small businesses. They embrace technology with open arms. They understand that technology is a driver of growth and its usage is inevitable to scale their business rapidly.

What are the technologies that every small business must adopt to run at a pace that they desire? This post answers that question. Here are a handful of such technologies to get you started with.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System

According to Salesforce SMB Research Infographic, growing SMBs are two times more likely to use a CRM compared to SMB laggards. The infographic also reports that at least one of out of every 3 SMB uses a CRM to better manage their customer data.

The benefits that a CRM system can bring to a growing SB are numerous:

  • Access to connected data
  • Better understanding of customers
  • Sales pipeline monitoring
  • Automation of routine tasks
  • Single repository of all customer information
  • Analytics and data reporting for business efficiency

Undoubtedly, a CRM software is a must adopt technology for small businesses that want to know their customers better and also sell better.

Cyber Security

66% of cyberattacks are aimed at small business  ~ Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report. There are two things which makes small businesses a juicy target for hackers. One, they are growing at an aggressive rate. They do have considerable amounts of data like customers’ credit cards, personal information and credentials that is worth stealing. Second, small businesses do not give cyber security as much importance that a large scale enterprise would be giving.

They assume that they are too small for hackers. The expensive price tags of security measures also discourages them from ramping up their cyber security defenses. But, there are penny-wise cyber security measures like RapidSSL certificate which helps to secure a small business’ online transactions. SSL certificates encrypt the data that is coming and going out of the business website, thus keeping the raw data safe from being stolen or hacked.

Cloud

Statista estimates that by 2022 global spending on Public cloud IT software (SaaS) and platform services (PaaS) will touch $216 Billion. Cloud has become the default choice for every IT endeavour. From deploying applications to hosting data centers, there is infinite opportunity in the cloud.

Cloud helps small businesses achieve massive cost savings required for IT infrastructure. In fact, it is cloud which enables small businesses to rapidly scale their services without being bogged down by upfront costs and rigid infrastructure.

Small businesses that want IT agility, flexibility and scalability must move their operations to the cloud. SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) are the popular options that can be used to scale a small business.

Enterprise Mobility

Mobility is culmination of people, technology and processes. It is not a standalone technology as such. Small businesses need enterprise mobility to cater to the growing demands of two sets of users – one, the business users themselves and two, the customers.

Enterprise mobility helps employees to use a wide variety of devices and applications to work from anywhere they are at any time they wish. For customers, it offers an omni-channel user experience which is not restricted to any fixed channel. A classic example is a mobile app.  Employees can use a mobile app to raise tickets for their office administration purposes. Customers, on the other hand, can use a mobile application to track their orders, make payments, get product updates and much more.

Enterprise mobility broadens the scope of usage for several stakeholders thus making it easy for small businesses to scale their customer base rapidly.

Machine Learning

Machine learning, which is a subset of Artificial Intelligence is wrongly assumed to be the forte for only large business houses. The truth is, there are several machine learning applications that small businesses can leverage to deliver better customer service, make data-driven decisions and also automate routine tasks. The end results are obvious – easier customer acquisition and retention, cost-efficient decision making, proactive customer service.

Some business operations where SMBs can deploy machine learning include conversational interfaces (chatbots) for customer service across social channels, data visualization, data modeling for customer profiling, setting rule-based billing, understanding customer intent and so on.

Mixed Reality

Mixed reality is the umbrella term used for real-time experiences that are created using a merger of physical environments and virtual objects. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are the two most popular mixed reality technologies.

  • Virtual reality places users in virtual environments where 3D objects respond to the user’s physical gestures.
  • Augmented reality on the other hand, places digital objects over physical objects when they are viewed through a screen.

Both these mixed reality technologies can be used by small businesses for a wide-variety of purposes like giving customer demos, showing artificial replicas of personalized products, virtual tours of products and so on.

The days ahead for SMBs

SMBs need to embrace new-age technologies with a feverish passion to step up their offerings. From revamping their services to offering superior customer service, there is so much that technology can empower a small business with.