How Technology Plays a Vital Role in Small Business Growth?

Many small businesses still consider cutting technologies are something meant for large enterprises and leading business brands. But in reality, small businesses can be more benefitted by the state of the art technologies than their large counterparts. In fact, technology in more than one ways created a level playing field for small and big businesses. 

Digitization pushed by the latest technologies can help small businesses save a lot of time and resources. For small businesses resource crunch and lack of manpower is often common and technologies can play an important role in breaching these gaps. As the faster time to market facilitated by faster development and efficient production is crucial for gaining a competitive edge in the market, small businesses meeting the competitive demand have no option but to embrace cutting technologies. 

The Affordable Technologies and Tools Made Things Easier 

These days, the vast majority of tools and applications for enterprise environments are built and designed keeping the typical requirements of the small businesses in mind. According to the latest study, a whopping 90% of small businesses actually use various applications for the purpose of workplace collaboration and business communication. The majority of these tools are used by enterprises for their internal communication while a considerable portion of them are used for the sales process, marketing, and lead generation. Thanks to affordable small business-specific applications CRM solutions are no longer just used by large businesses.  

The adoption of technology has been made easier for small businesses by the below-mentioned business technologies and applications. 

Data Security: 

Since every business relies heavily on digital presence they are also exposed to the increasing volume of malware threats and data breaches.

Naturally, every small business with a considerable digital footprint requires data security tools.

Customer Relationship Management(CRM): 

A CRM solution is extremely important for modern businesses to carry out customer interaction with the objective of lead generation and customer retention.

HR Software: 

For best talent acquisition, employee integration, and maintaining productivity a Human Resource software is extremely important for businesses of any size and niche. 

Chatbots: 

To facilitate automated customer communication and streamlined customer support based on individual customer needs, chatbots are important tools for small businesses.

Small enterprises can also integrate chatbots with Messenger apps and their regular websites. 

Cloud Computing:

Since small businesses cannot afford large on-premise servers and fully-fledged enterprise IT setup, they find cloud computing services more affordable. 

Mobile Applications:

Since mobile applications provide the ease of native user experience and continuous communication with the customers, small businesses should consider building branded apps as part of their digital strategy. 

Key Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Embrace Latest Technologies 

Now that we have a fair idea about the extent a small business can embrace digitization and technologies, we need to explain the key benefits that can motivate small businesses to embrace cutting edge technologies and tools for their businesses. 

Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity

It can hardly be debated that technology enhances the efficiency of any organization and boost productivity by saving time and resources. Thanks to some of the cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, and cloud computing any business can be very precise, specific, less time consuming, and intelligent in operation. This ultimately results in enhanced productivity and more efficient output for organizations. 

Protection Against Security Vulnerabilities 

Since digitization also helped in the proliferation of sophisticated hacking attempts and security attacks on enterprise systems, every business needs to take cautious measures to ensure optimum data security.

Small businesses without maintaining a large team of security experts can now safeguard their processes and data from security threats through security software solutions.

Customer-Specific Communication

Relevant, streamlined, smooth, and frictionless communication is the key for business growth in a highly digitized world. Small businesses thanks to an array of communication tools can make personalized, customer-specific, and context-aware communication to push for more sales and business conversion. From the chat messaging apps to individual customers to social media communication for branding to personalized emails, companies can use communication tools in a multitude of ways to their advantage. 

Easier Lead Generation 

Most small businesses do not have a large sales and marketing team for reaching out to customers easily. Instead, they can rely on smart lead generation tools and CRM solutions. From using advanced data analytics solutions to using intelligent chatbots, small businesses can generate business leads by using numerous tools and applications. 

Happier Workplace and Enhanced Employee Engagement 

Thanks to the state of the art communication and collaboration tools now even small businesses can afford to embrace remote work processes. The remote collaboration through a mobile-enabled workforce no longer remains to be a monopoly of large businesses.

Even small businesses by utilizing affordable tools can ensure optimum productivity through remote collaboration and real-time activity tracking. Thanks to the flexibility of engaging a remote workforce, small businesses can ensure more workplace satisfaction and enhanced employee engagement. 

Staying Ahead of The Knowledge Curve 

Thanks to the integration of the latest technologies, small businesses can now help their employees to stay versed with the latest know-how and expertise for different domains. Thanks to easier access to technology and applications, employees can easily access knowledge resources and learn new skills for specific professional needs. The modern learning management systems for mobile apps help employees to get corporate training and skill development training anytime and anywhere. This helps small businesses to stay ahead of the knowledge curve to take on competition with more decisive steps. 

Enhanced Scalability 

Thanks to cutting edge technologies and solutions small businesses can reach out to more customers in far less time. Thanks to digital applications they can grow with the evolving needs and scale up their capacity without looking for on-premise hardware enhancements. Third-party applications, cloud, and cloud service providers helped businesses to stay more scalable and adaptable to evolving demands. 

Conclusion 

Technology no longer remains to be a choice for small businesses. It has become their lifeline of survival and growth. When the entire business universe is digitized, they cannot just remain blind to the era-defining role of technologies in business. 

Author Bio: 

Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 16+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.

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