Scaling Your Business with Tech Help: Short Guide

Periods of company growth are always an exciting time, as they provide new opportunities for you and your employees to succeed. However, with rapid growth comes an immediate need for new resources and a larger workforce. Until this needed help arrives, you and your teams could be spread quite thin as you try to serve the needs of both new and existing customers. 

Fortunately, businesses today enjoy a plethora of new technology that’s designed specifically with the growing business in mind. To help you better manage to scale your business, try looking into some of the following tech solutions, as well as which tools will best serve the unique demands of your business and industry.

Software to grow your internet presence

If your sales team is struggling to find new leads, or if you think your business could compete in a new, untapped market, developing new software—such as a website or phone app—can help you utilize the world wide web to better connect with relevant online communities. Some studies argue that as high as 70–80% of people use the internet to research businesses before deciding to visit their stores or make a purchase, which is why a strong online presence could be the missing piece in your strategy that puts you ahead of the competition.

Investing in mobile app development for Androids, iOS systems and even smartwatches is just one way to help your products and services reach their intended audience. In the past, consumers mostly accessed the internet through computers, but the future points toward a mobile-first preference. With 2.5 billion people around the world already engaged with social media, tapping into the mobile landscape with an app of your own is one option for businesses seeking new avenues for increasing profits.

ML&AI for predictive hiring

Perhaps the biggest conversations circulating the world of business are on the implications of a workforce dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning. For small businesses and HR departments, AI is a powerful tool that allows SMB recruiters to compete with larger competitors that have more resources and larger teams. 

One specific way that AI can help HR professionals prepare for the forecasted needs of their growing business is predictive hiring. By helping HR teams calculate the number of resources needed in the future, businesses can avoid saddling current teams with the extra work that comes with new clients. Predictive hiring considers the amount of time needed to find, interview, hire and onboard new team members, which helps confirm that new employees are trained and ready to contribute as you sign new deals.

Customer service that grows with you

The ink is still drying on a number of new deals, and you don’t have the time or resources at hand to hire and onboard new staff. Before you make impulsive purchases on new tools and equipment to help your current team get their work done, it’s important to shop carefully for tools that scale easily, allowing you to add extra users as you hire without having to purchase a completely new system.

If you haven’t already, consider expanding your customer communication channels to include a live chat option. A tool that lets companies interact with customers through their online and social pages, live chats help your marketing, sales and customer service teams quickly answer your customers’ most pressing questions. Customer service teams with limited bandwidth can use live chats to help easily acknowledge customer needs and help them feel appreciated.

Scaling businesses, furthermore, usually struggle to manage a high volume of customer inquiries, which is why implementing tools like cloud call center services can help your customer service team succeed at its size today as well as whatever it grows into in the future. Designed to assist managers in distributing incoming calls, assign customers to a designated agent for a more personalized experience and offer analytical insights for mapping the customer journey, cloud call centers can be quickly installed and scaled to tailor your business as it grows. 

In fact, a general rule of thumb when searching for scalable solutions is to find tools that are hosted on the cloud. Since you won’t need to manage these tools through your own on-site hardware, expanding your business with cloud computing can be as easy as buying a software license for each new member, as opposed to converting to an alternative for larger businesses.

Automating repetitive work

Are you overloaded with menial, repetitive tasks that eat up the time you need to handle high-level objectives? If so, automation could be a simple solution to help you tackle that growing pile of work. Automation is defined as “the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically.” In the context of business, automating tools helps organizations alleviate their workloads by allowing computers and machines to perform most, or all, of desired tasks.

Because your employees will no longer have to manually enter (and reenter) numbers, calculations or other information, automation tends to lower the chances of human error as well. This makes automation both more time- and quality-efficient than manual entry.

If you’re interested in automation but are unsure how to implement it into your business or do not have allocations for automation software, get started with one of the many free automation platforms available already. From scheduling social media posts to tracking emails, these tools help you better manage your time and your business so that you can tackle the challenges of scaling an organization.