In today’s society, it is almost impossible to stay on top of your personal game without utilising a multitude of devices and apps. Whether it’s just the alarm on your smart phone getting you up in time, or a calming meditation app to still the jostled waters of today’s pressurised society, we are eagerly lapping up advancements as fast as they can be developed.
The same goes for effectively running a business; if you’re not making the most of current tech, and staying abreast of trends and keeping a weather eye on potential future products, is your company really working to its full potential?
Loosely speaking, tech is created to facilitate a role undertaken by a human, but in less time and for less money in the long term. If we take data capture as an example, sure an employee could go through a list of sign up email addresses and manually add them all into a CRM but it is quicker to ensure you have software that auto-merges the data across from website to CRM.
Tech is also revolutionising the way we interact with customer service departments, making that touchpoint with clients a much more positive experience and reducing churn. By 2020, experts project that more than 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without the need for a human agent.
Let’s take a look why tech is so vital and at what is out there right now that could save you some time, some money or both.
CHATBOTS
Chatbots are becoming increasingly more common, with many being so well refined in terms of programming that users aren’t aware they’re actually engaging with a computer. This rise in a Artificial Intelligence is cultivating a much more customer centric environment where wait times are kept to an absolute minimum.
This is great news for the 65% of you who expect a response from a business via social media in under 2 hours!
A basic chatbot can be purchased for around £200 per month, and can serve an unlimited number of customers all at the same time. Even if you were to employ just 1 full time customer service agent, this employee alone would cost you upwards of £1000 pcm.
Chatbots are one of our favourite pieces of readily available tech around at the moment; adding the savings to the increased customer satisfaction and thus, increased repeat business, the ROI on these AI masterpieces can be huge.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is next on our techradar. Whilst it’s not really a “new” thing, social media and the ways in which we interact with it evolve quickly and organically, and with over 2.5 billion people using social media, allowing yourself to fall out of sync with the trends can potentially stifle your growth.
Whilst just getting onto social media platforms is a great first step, without proper planning and implementation of any sort of social media strategy, attempts to build a community may well fall flat.
Pro Tip – Utilise Customer Personas! Customer Personas have never been more useful than when it comes to deciding where, when and how to share information on social media. If you’re on Facebook but all your potential business is on Twitter, you’re going to lose out. Try gathering this info from current clients, store it in your CRM and analyse your metrics to find what’s right for your company.
VIDEO
Again, video has been around now for decades, but the way we interact with videos as a society is morphing.
With the rise of YoutTube to one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, video sharing has become a trusted vehicle through which to address multiple audiences.
However, video has evolved beyond unwieldy episodes, down to short clips and even gifs that are digestible to even the most time poor viewer, watched on the commute, waiting for the kettle to boil or mid-scroll through a social media feed.
Ever increasingly, companies are utilising short, snappy gifs, emojis, cartoons and memes to portray feelings and situations that words would struggle to capture. Leveraging this emotional connection with your audiences builds trust and community, from which you can assemble an army of promoters to market your business.
Pro Tip – Lift the curtain! A whopping 69 percent of millennials believe brand recognition and trust are the most important aspects of brand loyalty. Humanise your staff and your company…think Elon Musk & Tesla/Space X, Richard Branson & Virgin.
Not sure where to start on Social Media? “Going Social – Driving Loyalty Through Social Media”
With tech continuing to advance at a rate consumers can barely keep up with, who knows what’s round the corner; our money is on Machine learning, virtual reality and 360 video becoming more mainstream in the following months.