Businesses that leverage new technology see higher job growth and higher revenue growth than those who shy away from it. Now, if you want to scale and gain a sustainable competitive advantage, you have to be willing to adopt technology.
When you are experiencing rapid growth or scaling, you need technology that will help you manage your expanding business without compromising performance. Effective tools will help you streamline complex operations, improve decision making, provide access to information quickly, manage your workforce effectively, and keep customers engaged while still allowing you to grow your bottom line.
Here’s how you can use technology to scale your business.
Use Container Orchestration Technology To Scale Your App
For businesses that run applications, whether for customers or internal use, adopting container orchestration tools can make things much easier. This technology makes your app portable, meaning you don’t need to invest in physical servers to run it. Most importantly, it helps you to scale up and down automatically depending on demand.
With this server-less model, you never have to worry about maintaining physical infrastructure, so you can solely focus on developing and improving your tool. This technology will also help your app automatically recover and self-heal from failure. If you’re soon expecting massive traffic to your app, it’s time to partner with a container hosting platform for a smooth transition.
Automate Day-to-Day Tasks With Machine Learning
There are so many tasks around your business that are repetitive, tedious, and human-intensive. But if you take a closer look, there are many machines that can do these tasks. Manual data collection, data analysis, report generation, and accounting involves a lot of human resources. It also distracts employees from the work that matters at a time when you need them to focus on the growing business.
So, how do you identify machine learning opportunities in your business? If you’ve been sending emails to customers manually, start using email marketing automation tools. If you have massive tons of data that your employees have to go through, such as examining candidate resumes, get an applicant tracking system to examine potential hires.
Freeing employees from these tasks will cut costs and allow them to engage in more creative work.
Use Next Generation Onboarding Technology to Acclimatize New Hires Quickly
Onboarding new talent is one of the major challenges businesses encounter regularly. When scaling, you need to bring in new hires, but you also need time and resources to take new hires through the onboarding processes. If you don’t want to leave the new guys to fend for himself, embracing onboarding technology allows you to bring them up to speed smoothly and in a far shorter time frame.
A good tool will take the employee through every step of the onboarding without requiring a lot of human intervention. New employees can use technology to fill out and sign the paperwork, study the company culture, interact with all company apps, watch videos to understand their role better, and even learn about other employees in their department.
With this approach, recruits will hit the ground running, and your experienced team members won’t have to be distracted by training obligations.
Implement Chatbots to Improve Customer Relationships
Maybe a year ago, it was OK to have your employees answer customer questions and concerns. Now that your business is growing, there may be no realistic way to handle all the incoming queries. This doesn’t mean customer satisfaction should drop just because you’ve grown so fast. So what do you do? Instead of hiring additional customer service representatives, consider using chatbots to redirect some of the more common queries.
Chatbots are a way less expensive and more sustainable option that improves customer satisfaction. They can replicate the role of call reps by immediately answering customer inquiries. You can also engage website visitors using bots that prompt them to view new products or leave a review.
Foster Internal Communication With Collaborative Tools
During times of rapid growth, multiple employees get hired, managers take on new roles, and chains of commands shift frequently. Keeping up with all this can be quite a challenge for everyone. When you want everyone to be on the same page and all members of your organization to work as a team, you will need to use a collaborative platform.
Such a tool will allow you to communicate any change in roles to your company members in real time. It will also allow you to inform employees on other company matters without conducting time-consuming meetings. Collaborative tools are not just limited to communicating official information, they are also deployed to assign employee tasks, exchange ideas, share work documents, and so much more.
It’s Time To Start Taking Emerging Technologies Seriously
While we all want our businesses to reach great heights, we need to be aware that growth comes with its challenges. Adopting the latest technologies can help your business eliminate some of the pitfalls of rapid growth, allow you to become more efficient and resilient, and ensure you reach your full potential during this crucial time.