The businesses that are performing at the peak of their industries have fully embraced technology and all of the possibilities that it brings.
Technology enables businesses to save money and gives them room to innovate and provide a better customer experience. The ways in which businesses can use technology are almost endless.
Use digital assistants
A digital assistant is a computer program that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to communicate with people and to carry out tasks.
Companies can make use of digital assistants by integrating them with their websites and allowing them to act as a chatbot feature for customers. Customers can speak immediately with the chatbot at any time of the day or night, meaning that they can receive an answer to their query immediately without the need to talk to a call centre assistant.
Digital assistants are highly advanced, so they can also carry out tasks. A simple example is if a customer wanted to book an appointment, they could talk to the chatbot about it, and the chatbot could also add the appointment into the companies booking system.
Because they make use of AI, digital assistants can be trained to carry out any number of tasks, and they can learn as they go.
Using them enables businesses to continually improve their service, reduce the amount they need to spend on employing humans to answer the telephone, respond to emails, and provide customer service levels that people have come to expect.
Look after your existing network
Any business that wants to begin utilizing new technologies should first do the work to ensure that their existing IT infrastructure is being looked after. It is important to monitor your network against cybersecurity threats and be sure that you do not experience too much network traffic or downtime that could impact performance.
A lot of new technologies will require a significant amount of bandwidth to operate efficiently, which could start to impact performance on networks that are not maintained properly.
Notably, slow network speeds can reduce the responsiveness of websites that are hosted on servers on the network. Unresponsive websites can lose business revenue, and they can even impact website SEO rankings.
Use data
Data is big business for a reason. Business intelligence (BI) can help businesses make better decisions by using present and historical data to predict outcomes.
Businesses can use BI systems to collect data on customer and competitor behaviour and then use this information to decide which course of action is likely to be the most profitable.
For example, by using BI, you might notice a trend for buying a certain product at a certain time of the year, which would tell you that investing in the manufacture and marketing of that product is likely to be profitable at that time of year.
BI systems gather data and then catalogue and store it so that it can be queried later to find the answers to specific questions using custom-built algorithms.
