The Transformative Impacts of Technology on Businesses

We live in a world that is dominated by technology and digitalization. Every aspect of our living has been either modified, simplified, or in many cases, accelerated to a better, more prosperous existence. Similarly, it has changed the business landscape across the globe, making way for numerous disruptive innovations, dynamic business models, and automation for faster turnovers and development cycles. Technology has fundamentally transformed all areas of businesses from operation to delivering value to customers. Whether a small business or a large enterprise, technology is the most critical requirement for organizations to survive and thrive.

Let us see and compare some of our modernbusinesses today vs. their erstwhile methods and how they contribute to our economy today.

Technology in Sales

Sales representatives heavily depend on the market’s pulse, trends, sales figures, and analytics. Unlike pre-digital times, where sales reps had to spend enormous amounts of their time gathering and collating information to understand business performance, today,various software products help sales teams track, analyze, and even create pertinent reports daily. This enables them to make swift product transfers and markdown decisions, thus enabling better sell-throughs and profit margins.

CRM

Today, Customer Relationship Management software is considered the backbone of any organization’s marketing department. It provides the most valuable information by helping you track your customers’behavior, needs, and buying patterns, which help formulate better sales and marketing strategies. Gone are the days of manual surveys and snail-mail approaches. The advancements in CRMs today have enabled real-time updates to execute advanced lead scoring and automate repetitive tasks and help sales reps optimize their sales procedures. In turn, this would improve customer retention, build better relations with the customers, and enhance their loyalty.

Digital impact on retail

The rise of technology in retail has led to the organic emergence of the e-commerce model of businesses, which is the most rapidly growing business ecosystem today. E-commerce has become the easiest, fastest, and most hassle-free shopping mode for customers everywhere. The high-quality product websites, mobile apps, and quick checkout process have revolutionized business for brands and services.

As for brick and mortar stores, the in-store experiences have also changed radically. In the yesteryears, shoppers had to snip coupons from newspapers and magazines to avail of discounts at shopping outlets. Now, all they have to do is flash their smartphones during checkout to access the in-store deals.This is captured by the brand’s digital systems that track consumer behavior trends linked to the inventory systems, which are further used to activate individualized customer journey events like email and SMS messaging.

Customer Service Technology

With the ever-growing volumes of virtual transactions and interactions,brands must addressall their customers’ concerns concerning products or services to improve the quality and maintain a steady business. While this is the key deliverable, they must also ensure fast communication, quick resolutions, contain costs, and deliver satisfactory outcomes to the customers. Technology has revamped the call centers by self-service with intuitive automation so that customers can get their answers faster.Automation allows customer service reps to work smarter and faster and reduces costs due to quick transactions and reduced overheads.

Chatbots and live chatting are other crucial aspects of technology in customer service. It is beneficial in automated ticketing, addressing customers who need quick assistance,and alsoenables collecting customer data for analytics.

With the above facts, it is more than evident that technology has not only transformed businesses across industries and services, but it has become a norm for businesses to survive today. This was even more prominent during the pandemic when adapting quickly to supply chain disruptions, market pressures, and drastically changing customer expectations became critical.

According toInternational Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Digital Transformation (DX) Spending Guide, spending on the digital transformation of business practices, products, and organizations continues at a solid pace. Itis forecasted to reach $2.8 trillion in 2025, more than double the amount allocated in 2020.While organizations allocate their DXinvestments toward various business areas such as back-office support and infrastructure for core business functions such as accounting & finance, sales, marketing, human resources, enterprise IT, supply chain management, engineering, design and research, and operations, customer experience investments has been predicted to see the fastest investment growth.