The Role of IT in Business Growth: Leveraging Technology for Success

The author William S. Burroughs famously wrote, “When you stop growing you start dying.” Although he had intended to comment on personal evolution, the statement is just as relevant to business endeavors. If a business is not growing, expanding, and innovating, it’s losing ground to the competitors who are. Small businesses, which are often at a competitive disadvantage due to limited resources, must leverage all available tools for growth. And these days, the most potent tools are found in digital technology. At KMF Technologies, our IT experts help New Jersey small businesses tap into a range of ever-improving tech solutions to power their business success.

How digital technology fuels business growth

Oddly enough, Burroughs was a beneficiary of a technological innovation that spurred business growth. His grandfather had patented the first adding machine, which revolutionized accounting and generated enough of a fortune to send Burroughs to Harvard and provide the monthly stipend that supported his early writing career. Those are results that most small business owners would gladly accept for their own family.

With each generation, technology advances and its application to business processes changes. In the here and now, these are a few of the ways that business technology can fuel your company’s growth:

• Improved efficiency — Efficiency means getting the greatest level of production for your efforts. IT optimizes processes, workflow, and oversight, saving substantial amounts of time, which allows for greater productivity.
• Automation — Companies can free their workers from routine, time-consuming tasks, while reducing manual input errors. This saves time and eliminates waste, while freeing your human resources for tasks where they’re truly needed, such as customer-facing activities and strategic planning.
• Inventory control — When you maintain optimal levels of product, you don’t disappoint your customers with late fulfillment or pay unnecessary fees for storage. IT tools can provide real-time visibility into stock levels, order status, and demand forecasting.
• Improved communication — These tools improve customer service and collaboration among workers. Better service improves customer satisfaction and builds brand loyalty. Getting workers out of their silos and into collaborative discussions leads to greater synergy, which drives innovation. Given the decentralized nature of business in this age of remote work, your company needs communication platforms that overcome physical distances, such as video conferencing, project management software, and cloud-based document sharing.
• Better financial management — IT tools can enhance various tasks, such as bookkeeping, receivables, collections, budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting. The company thus realizes a range of benefits, from on-time payments that prevent late fees to improved cash flow that reduces reliance on credit to better strategic allocation of resources.
• Enhanced system maintenance — A proactive approach to network maintenance prevents downtime for greater continuity of performance. It also improves network security.
• Improved strategic planning — Companies benefit from in-depth data analyses, so leaders can make informed decisions about business development. IT provides insights into market trends by deep-diving into customer data. Companies can improve upselling by anticipating customer needs and tailoring product offerings to meet those needs. You can also accurately measure the success of various initiatives by examining key performance indicators.
• Stronger brand loyalty — As previously mentioned, when you service your customers more efficiently, you increase customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty. Technology can play a key role through advanced customer relationship management (CRM) systems, chatbots, and automated, personalized marketing tools. These systems also consolidate customer data, which companies can mine for insights into a customer’s buying history and preferences that enable appropriate product recommendations, leading to opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Finally, IT can supercharge customer support and outreach, enabling the quick and satisfactory resolution of issues and continuous, positive engagement.
• Scalability of resources — Competitive businesses must be nimble enough to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Business growth often requires companies to scale operations up, which puts added demands on their IT infrastructure and cloud computing services. Managed service providers enable companies to ramp up workloads during peak periods when there’s high demand, then scale down when demand wanes, all without incurring outsized costs.

Different companies have different priorities for their IT network, based on their current and future needs. The IT experts at KMF Technologies can personalize a plan for your company that provides a competitive edge, enabling you to capture market share from even the largest competitors. For innovative solutions designed to foster small business growth, call us today.