For people who have been doing business in the last ten years, technology’s change might not be noticeable. However, those who have been around before Wi-Fi was even made available to the public know how the business world is an entirely different practice now.
Back in the Industrial Revolution, innovation meant making the steam engine produce a rotary movement. The domino effect started. There was the first light bulb. If you think about it, the domino effect is still going, and it’s not stopping anytime soon.
Before social media pages, businesses had to print physical ads to insert in newspapers and magazines. It is indeed fascinating how much the Internet and technology as a whole turned business into what it is today. Here are different ways technology has changed the way of doing business.
1. Productivity
You may not have realized this, but the main driving force behind innovation is the desire to solve problems. Walking or riding carriages took too long, so the train was a brilliant innovation. It took too long to transfer data from one device to another through an Infrared connection; then, there was Bluetooth to the rescue. Everything that you have right now results from the desire to solve a previous problem.
In business, problem-solving looks as simple as spreadsheet software. An application like Microsoft Excel has made a huge impact on productivity in the workplace. Imagine having to type in every input (or worse, write) and then performing addition or division manually. Spreadsheets have also become every business owner’s friend when managing payrolls and tracking expenses. However, even those two needs are being specifically solved by more types of software right now.
2. Marketing
Marketing also saw a drastic change in the past years. Through the help of analytics like that of Google, targeting customers is now a lot easier. Even though it has also become complicated, technology has surely allowed for better marketing practices and accurate targeting of customers.
If the goal of your business right now is brand awareness, simply publishing a Facebook advertisement to be shown to specific potential customers is easy. Brand awareness is important, especially for less known fields. For example, you can run a targeted ad for your staff surveillance services to be shown to businesses that might need such services. In the first place, they might not be aware that they can check the verity behind their employees’ sick leave claims.
It’s pretty much like going to a party that people in business attend and making small talk about letting them know that you offer such services. Only this time, you don’t have to talk to many people just to know what field they are in or whether they will need your service. With the help of data from Facebook, all it takes are a few clicks, and your business card goes to the right people.
3. Customer support
Gone are the days when people had to send an actual handwritten letter to a company to let them know that a batch of cereal boxes had weird things in them. Nowadays, all it takes is a message on one of their social media pages, and a customer support representative will pop up, ready to receive a complaint.
Aside from the cure to such complaints, technology has massively helped prevent. Business analytics can gather data on consumers’ behavior and predict their preferences in a product.
4. Work flexibility
At the height of the pandemic, mobility was limited. Not long after, video conferencing platforms and productivity apps popped up one after another like wild mushrooms. By the looks of it, working remotely will stay even after the pandemic is over. Mobile data rates are now becoming cheaper and the rates for cloud technology and storage. The amount a company spends on internet allowances for its employees might be cheaper than renting an office space.
5. Admin duties
Particular software providers allow businesses to connect employees or manage multiple projects all at once. Technology has also helped with seemingly simple but tedious tasks such as managing payrolls and paying suppliers. Now, everything can be automated, and all business owners or point persons need to do is check whether the scheduled tasks were done on schedule.
If you were raised in the Internet generation, you might be feeling sorry for the people before you who had to manually clock in for work or stand in line to receive their salary. However, you can also expect that the next generations of people in the workplace will probably feel the same way for you. Even with all the amazing technology that surrounds people nowadays, all of these will be obsolete in no time.
