From Luxury to Life Support: Technology That Serves as the Foundation of the Modern Business World

Even as recently as just a few short years ago, a business that counted “state-of-the-art technology” as one of the many weapons in its arsenal was considered a luxury.

Times have certainly changed as technology hasn’t just leveled the playing field for many industries–it has practically decimated it.

Being “tech-savvy” is no longer something only for tech-based companies. Everyone, from major retailers to the self employed to everyone in between, has had to embrace it as a concept in order to survive. There are a few key things that businesses in particular are absolutely going to NEED to utilize in order to regain the type of competitive advantage they once had.

It Begins and Ends With the User Experience

Simply providing the user with the product, service or even answer to a question is no longer enough. People don’t just want to find out WHERE they can buy an item — they want to have an enjoyable time while they do it. As a result, focusing on the user experience has become arguably THE most important thing that businesses have to do in terms of technology to survive in the marketplace. Studies have shown that if your website takes too long to load or if it’s too difficult to navigate, people will look elsewhere — even if they know your site has the information they wanted in the first place.

Analytics for Business

Thanks largely due to the rate at which technology continues to advance, businesses are dealing with much higher volumes of data on a daily basis than ever before. Data is and will always be a very good thing when it comes to making decisions, but not all data is created equally. Separating the wheat from the chaff is of paramount importance, so to speak, which is why business analytics are so important. They don’t just allow a business to process those terabytes of data — they allow them to make sense of it. They allow them to cut through the noise and get to the true story that the data is trying to tell underneath, allowing them to gain the type of valuable context and insight that they can use to make the most informed, actionable strategic decisions moving forward.

Mobile Apps

According to Pew Research Center, a full 68% of adults in the United States own a smartphone. This is up from just 35% in 2011. Additionally, Pew Research indicates that over 50% of customers who interact with a business via their mobile device are likely to make a purchase within just 24 hours. What does this tell you? Simple: You need a quality mobile app, and you need one as quickly as possible.

Based on this information, it should come as no surprise that more and more businesses are making an effort to hire mobile app developers as a result. Even if you’re not an e-commerce business or offer products and services relevant to the mobile space in general, you STILL need a mobile app to reach this increasingly large target audience of passionate supporters of the platform. There will come a day very soon where EVERY business will have a mobile app. The ones that don’t will be doomed to be forgotten in an era where they still think that just having a website is “enough to get the job done.” It isn’t. Not anymore, at least.