Technology and the Small Business Owner’s Office
Where is your office? Or rather where are your offices. If you’re anything like me then my office is wherever I happen to be — parked up in the car, a coffee shop, on the train, a hotel lobby, the airport, a friend’s house or at a customer’s place. Sometimes, well quite a lot really, I also work from home where I have a more comfortable workstation set up. Our online world supports this today so very well with smartphones, tablets, laptops, cloud computing, mobile data and loads of free WiFi. We can do so much from anywhere.
But, as good as all this is, do you sometimes feel let down because you cannot get the information you need, or you can’t complete an urgent transaction because your supplier doesn’t follow through with their technology — and their web site, as pretty as it may be, just doesn’t link their back office systems with you, their customer. Annoying isn’t it!
Well, what about you? How does your business score in terms of enabling your customers to fully interact with you online? So many small businesses seem to not go beyond the sales pitch online, largely because they perceive the cost of the systems needed to operate online are just for the big boys, or that they’re just a small business and their customers don’t want or need it, so they are happy to carry on as normal, with systems that don’t join up.
What would life — and your bottom line — be like if you if you really could integrate your whole business and give your customers tools that would make it easier to work together? Expensive? No, not today! 5 years ago maybe and what’s more you don’t even have to invest in any new hardware …you probably already have all you need and more. Being truly mobile has never been so easy.
What you will need to invest in however is a bit of up front time and investigation. You need to understand what your business processes are and how you currently interact with your customers and in turn what needs to be imprvoed. Then you’ll need to find the right bits of online cloud based systems and apps that will allow you to glue it all together. Maybe a custom built app, that allows customers to safely access your back office if needed. This is no longer a pipe dream — it is out there waiting to be discovered and used, with very affordable points of entry for small businesses. Tech is providing businesses with the opportunity to get closer to their customers than ever before. It is also making it easier for businesses to function completely remotely. Enterprise apps are gaining popularity as a means for businesses to advance their companies productivity, mobility and security. The creation of an app from which your employees can access and record data on-the-go, is invaluable to a business which is looking to work remotely. The addition, of an app to a business can be transformational. Learn more about enterprise apps that Red C have been involved in and the results they have produced.
Furthermore, here’s a couple of ideas to get you thinking and investigating using a number of cloud based systems linked together with tools from Zapier.com (I’m not promoting them, but they are a good example). It works like this, someone completes a Wufoo form on your website, which sends you an email but also creates an entry in your Salesforce CRM. Which in turn, then adds the contact to Mailchimp, Quickbooks or Xero and creates an entry in Google calendar. You then create a document and save it in Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive and share it with your team through Slack, who instantly see your messages get on with it straight away, maybe you’ll also invite your customer to keep up to date with a Trello card that automatically updates key messages from Slack! Once you’ve invoiced and a customer has paid via PayPal you could automatically send an email or SMS to say thanks. The possibilities are almost endless, especially as you and your customers already have the hardware devices in your pockets and bags. Maybe you’ve been able to customise something like Zoho.com to more directly suit the complexities of your business …great, that can be linked with other cloud systems through services like Zapier too.
The technology that enables this kind of connectivity is the API (application program interface) that allows software to talk with other software. Most of us don’t need to understand how this works, just how to make the most of the fact that it does!
Tim Matthews
About the author: Tim Matthews has been the director and owner of a number of British software development companies through the 1990’s to 2010, responsible for online projects for the likes of Sony, Roche, Total, BHF and many small businesses. He now enjoys life as a freelance online systems consultant and helping small business owners realise the benefit of cloud computing.
