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Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are frequently looking for new ways to outsmart competitors, streamline business processes, and improve the customer experience. You have a lot to gain by pursuing innovation for your business. As markets become increasingly competitive, continuous innovation is key to keeping your business relevant.
Innovation is not just about implementing the latest technology, but also about exploring new ideas and inventive ways of doing things. Check out the following tips from TechSwitchCF to learn how you can leverage innovation to grow your business.
Prioritize Business Process Management
Business process management (BPM) involves evaluating your existing business processes and making improvements to streamline and automate tasks that typically require manual human intervention. BPM can help you determine which tech upgrades will offer the greatest impact on your business processes, saving your business time and money every day. A combination of automation, outsourcing and business process management will facilitate powerful digital transformation in your business.
Use Data to Guide Your Decisions
Data is key to innovation. While data is often used to improve audience targeting in marketing campaigns, it can also help you make impactful business decisions regarding the tools you use to get things done. Collecting data about your existing business processes will help you determine what you need to improve. Lucidchart explains that it’s important to establish performance metrics that you can use to measure the success of your tech improvements. For example, if you want to measure the efficacy of your customer support processes, you may use key performance indicators (KPIs) like your average support resolution time and customer retention rate to see where you need to focus your improvements.
Get Comfortable with Automation
As the owner of a small to medium-sized business, it can be hard to step away and hand off your responsibilities to automation tools. But task automation is critical to the growth of your business. Once your business reaches a certain size, handling everyday tasks without automation will prove incredibly challenging. Start looking for automation solutions for your most time-consuming tasks. Meeting scheduling, customer feedback collection, and invoicing are great candidates for automation. Once you get comfortable automating simple things, you can explore more complex automation capabilities offered by tools like Zapier and Integromat.
Shift to Cloud Computing
Cloud technology will open up your automation opportunities. By storing data in the cloud, you can make use of all kinds of online automation apps to streamline your business. Beyond this, cloud computing offers several other innovative improvements to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Salesforce reports that businesses that invest in cloud computing see 53% faster revenue growth compared to their competitors! Cloud computing offers cost savings, enhanced security, IT flexibility, business mobility, and much more.
Cloud computing also improves disaster recovery. Remember, no business is immune to IT disasters. Whether you’re the victim of a cyberattack or a simple hardware failure, you need to get your business back up and running as soon as possible after a shutdown. Storing your data in the cloud makes it easy to restore lost data and minimize potential downtime.
Encourage Employee Innovation
Your employees are a fantastic source of innovative ideas. Because your employees have a very good understanding of your existing business processes, they’re in the perfect position to point out inefficiencies and come up with solutions to streamline everyday tasks. Encourage your employees to find smarter ways to work. Most importantly, don’t punish your employees for innovation by providing them with more work. Their innovative ideas should be leveraged to make their lives easier as well!
When your business is enjoying success, it can be tempting to stick with tried and true methods. But maintaining business as usual can limit your growth. Making changes to the status quo by leveraging automation, BPM, and more is necessary to keep up with competitors, enhance the value you provide to your customers and take your business to new levels!
Are you looking for more articles like this? Take a look around the TechSwitchCF website for how-to guides, tech reviews, and the latest innovations in the tech world.