Businesses are moving at an incredibly fast pace, one largely driven by technology. It allows business owners to be always on, and connected to their company 24/7.
Ironically, the technology that was designed to improve business efficiency can also have the effect of slowing it down, as business owners simply spend too much time using the various platforms, apps and devices at their disposal.
So how can they free up some of that time by making the technology work more efficiently for them?
Having to wear so many hats within a business, entrepreneurs need to understand what technology they should be embracing and which are mere distractions, says Andrew Hawkins, managing director at advertising agency Doner.
“Technology should be used to make doing business easier. All too often it’s used for technology’s sake,” he says. “If all you are doing is managing technology to the detriment of your business, then it’s time to look at consolidating and prioritising what is essentially needed and what really adds value.”
Before investing time and money in implementing technology, building a website or establishing a social presence, entrepreneurs should evaluate what the objective is of the specific piece of hardware or software.
One area where technology has delivered real business benefits is in collaboration, enabling individuals and teams in remote locations to collaborate in real time.
Take conference-calling technology, for example. Used properly, this can be a godsend: replicating the experience of a face-to-face meeting at a fraction of the time and cost afforded by business travel.
But as Rob Houston, unified communications product manager at communications firm Biamp explains, it can also be a time waster.
He says: “Research has found that, on average, the first seven to 10 minutes of a typical 60-minute meeting are wasted with users struggling to use the conferencing system effectively, waiting for everyone to dial in, and determining who is participating. It’s an expensive problem, equating to over £3.53bn per annum of lost value.”
The key is to understand exactly what the business wants out of a conferencing solution, and consider how its success will be measured. For example, are employees reducing business travel over the year? Have both employee satisfaction and colleague relationships improved?
“Business owners need to think carefully about their investment and how they will roll it out,” says Houston. “It can be tempting to run straight into a full, top-of-the-line investment. Test the water and address the more fundamental issues first, such as space, the average number of meeting participants, and the environment.”
Customer communication is another area of business that has been revolutionised by email, social media and mobile and technology, but can still zap a business owner’s time.
The advice from Nick Leech, digital director at web hosting and domain firm 123-reg is for business owners to capture email addresses on their website and automatically engage using an email marketing tool.
He says: “Users who sign up to a regular newsletter service through your website are already interested in hearing more about your company. With this information you can tailor your marketing campaigns to your audience, ensuring that the right people are receiving the right content, rather than wasting time targeting the wrong audience.”
Another time-saving technology tip is to automate social media posts using apps such as Tweetdeck. Instead of posting updates in real-time, these apps allow you to schedule tweets to go out at a set time.
Leech also advocates the use of an IFTTT (If This Then That) approach to automate social media or lead generation tasks. He says: “An IFTTT recipe creates a connection between the products and applications you use on a daily basis, automating day-to-day repetitive actions to help you save time. For example, if you receive a payment from a customer via PayPal, then a new row will be added into your Google Docs spreadsheet with the full details of that transaction and you’ll have saved a few minutes of work from your day.”
Accounting software has transformed that most hated of business tasks, keeping on top of the books. There are plenty of cloud-based software systems around to save time and make accounts management more flexible, but business owners need to choose the right system.
Gary Turner, UK managing director of cloud-based accounting software business Xero, says small firms should pick and mix the software they need. He says: “Most of them don’t actually need a whole office suite these days, with documents, spreadsheets and presentation packages all thrown in. Today, you can pick the features you need rather than what comes bundled together, which allows you to update your work on the go as well as saving precious memory, power and storage on your laptop or tablet.”
Customer relationship management is almost a product of evolving technology and absolutely key to keeping customers engaged and coming back to a company.
Ian Collard, managing director of Identity Methods says: “There are lots of good CRM systems that do a perfectly adequate job, such as Zoho and Sugar, and are fairly cheap on a pay-as-you-use basis but require some time and expertise to set up.
Most can be integrated with the company’s communications and email platform and should be mobile optimised.
“It should be possible to take a call from a client, make the note of the call on the CRM app and have a record of the conversation in your central CRM system with five minutes of the call finishing,” says Collard.
Increased functionality may mean increased cost, so business owners should avoid buying functions they don’t need and will never use.
“If you choose wisely and focus on your business needs, the technology won’t become an albatross around your neck,” he adds. “At the end of the day, people do business with people and the more layers of technology you put between them the harder the relationships are to maintain.”
Content on this page is produced to a brief agreed with E.ON, sponsor of the Efficiency hub.
