Guide to building a digital-first small business in 2021

2020 was a year of realizations for businesses around the world. When health scares like the COVID-19 pandemic hits without warning, life’s normalcy gets disrupted beyond imagination. Companies need to adapt to new ways of working in a matter of days. For smaller businesses with little or no contingency plans in place, the pandemic was an eye-opener. Studies earlier have shown that nearly 80% of small businesses in the US did not take full advantage of the capabilities of digital and productivity tools available in the market for their use. 

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In today’s digital economy, consumer behavior is directly influenced by the rapid proliferation of digital services and connected devices. There is no escaping the digital transformation realm for small businesses as the pandemic proved that digital supremacy is an inevitable need for survival and not an operational luxury for them. On this note, let us examine the top 4 crucial technology trends that a small business cannot afford to ignore in 2021.

Read more: Top 10 Ways to Set up an Effective Business Strategy in 2021 

1. Autonomous Customer Service

Once relied heavily on by customers, traditional services are moving into self-service portals wherein customers can configure and transact independently. There is a rising demand for instant and autonomous customer service. Nearly 62% of US consumers prefer talking to a chatbot while interacting with a business. AI-enabled chatbots offer instant and more data-driven support decisions to consumers when they interact. In a traditional setting, customers are forced to wait long to connect with a human support associate and explain their whole problem. Often, customers will be diverted to another department and the story of waiting and explaining repeats. With autonomous chatbot and voice assistants, most queries receive replies instantly. Also, precise data is collected and transferred to a desk executive when connecting with a human support agent.

2. Integrating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

It is hard to find businesses without a dedicated website today. Considering that a good majority of your potential customers find out about you from the internet, building a website is necessary for any business. But today, nearly 50.8% of global internet traffic comes through mobile phones. People browsing your website on their mobile phones expect information pages to load as quickly as possible. For this, small businesses must deploy AMP principles in their web development to ensure that every web page offers a seamless loading and viewing experience in mobile browsers. Any delays in page loads can create unsatisfactory experiences for visitors, and your bounce rates will go up if AMP is not incorporated in your web experiences.

3. Marketing Personalization

Do you know that 80% of consumers are likely to do business with a brand that offers them personalized experiences? Personalization begins from the first step that businesses take to reach out to their customers, which is marketing. Rather than shooting out mass email campaigns, sticking flyers and billboards across the city, small businesses can utilize the vast plethora of modern marketing platforms to roll out customized and highly personal campaigns to attract the right audience to their stores or websites. Customers want only the right content to be delivered to their mailboxes to make more informed decisions. Small businesses need to use AI-driven personalized marketing platforms that can quickly identify interest patterns and deploy relevant messaging and recommendations to the correct customer to convince them of a purchasing decision quickly.

Read more: Key Predictions on How Workplace Technology and Culture Will Evolve in 2020 & Beyond 

4. Seamless Omni-channel experience

Irrespective of the digital channel that consumers use to reach out, small businesses must deliver an omnichannel experience across their digital landscape. From seamless transactions to better and intelligent recommendations and improved agility in back-office administration, small businesses need to have powerful digital platforms deployed across their operations’ length and breadth. Companies cannot leave their customers lurking in the dark, waiting for information as the competition might take advantage and lure them away with better experiences.

With the rising demand for faster and more digital-friendly experiences by consumers, small businesses should streamline their business process automation and management exercise. They need to efficiently coordinate workflows in different departments, such as finance, supply chain, logistics, HR, marketing, and sales. Additionally, they need to ensure a responsive digital infrastructure for their front-facing internet assets as well. 

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

Using intelligent business management platforms like InfinCE is necessary for small businesses to compete in the new digital era. From building a robust digital backend for your business to setting up a roadmap for continuous success on the digital front, InfinCE can reshape your digital ambitions in the most cost-effective way possible. Get in touch with us to know more about how your small business can conquer 2021 with InfinCE Digital Workplace.

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How to Build an Effective and Solid Business Strategy for 2021!

For most businesses, 2020 has, undoubtedly, been a year they would want to write off from their history. As some things are meant to be forgotten, and things should move on, businesses must also look for the opportunities 2021 and upcoming years hold. Prospects will keep coming and going, but having a defined business strategy can help a company make the most of these opportunities.

Read more: Business Process Management Strategy for your Small Business 

If you don’t have any business development strategies or are looking for suggestions, you can consider the following recommendations.

Ten ways to form an ideal business strategy

NOTE: Not always, but sometimes implementing specific strategies may require you to take advantage of certain productivity tools, centralized IT Management applications, private IT infrastructure, etc. For any such tools and applications, you can always count on InfinCE. Using this tool, you can get desired business management software to improve business processes, achieve cost efficiencies and experience the utmost data security. What makes InfinCE the first choice among businesses is its unbeatable pricing, including a 30-day free trial.

Read more: How Successful Leaders Engage Employees Using Modern Business Communication Tools like InfinCE 

A company can incorporate the following suggestions to enhance its growth and competency and improve its business level strategy.

1. Have a realistic vision

In a business world, having a vision may seem cliché, but it is, in fact, an essential thing which a business must be precise, clear, and realistic about. As vision is a peek into the future, it must comprise aspirations related to the organization you want to develop and ascertain what success implies in various business terms like markets, volumes, customers, etc.

2. Be unique to have an edge

One of the most critical business strategies is to choose the right tools and techniques that can help you identify how your company can deliver unique value to its customers. In most divisions of the economy, businesses are struggling in the crowd of similarity. When you have a well-planned business strategy, you can stay on top of the competition through its pricing model, delivery system, service offering, and more.

3. Be clear about your targets

Poor targeting is one of the major barriers to the growth of a business. Lack of clarity in targets makes a company suffer from imprecise messaging, which in turn misaligns sales and marketing. Therefore, make sure to be clear about your targets so that your business can focus better on resources and device an integrated sale and marketing approach, where marketing enables sales productivity. With clear targets, you can execute sales and marketing plans more effectively.

4. Focus on systematic growth

Only through systematic and streamlined growth can a company invest in talent, technology, and new tools. To achieve this growth, you need a business level strategy. A robust business development strategy allows your business to grow in the required dimensions.

Once your company is precise on this aspect, it will be easier to anticipate how much you can afford in terms of capital expenditure, overhead expenses, resource management, etc.

5. Decisions must be fact-based

Most executives complain about a lack of adequate data when planning or executing a business development strategy. Having access to fact-based data or information (through public records, social media trends, geographical location, etc.) allows a business to quickly quantify the value of various segments served, thus easing the decision making for multiple operations.

6. Have a balanced short & long term planning

While some companies may prefer to have short term planning to achieve their objective, others may choose long term planning as a better way to achieve it. Instead of choosing one or the other, it is advisable to have a balanced mix of short-term and long-term planning. Having such a balance allows companies to keep the team and the strategies aligned with the objectives through long term planning.

7. Agility is Necessity

Companies should always be focused on long term scenarios; however, they should be responsive as well. For example, one of the critical components in forming a business strategy should be anticipating market trends. Companies should evaluate long-term market trends and follow procedures based on this information by holding strategy review meetings at regular intervals.

8. Bring transparency

As companies are looking to hire more millennial employees in their team, it has led to agility and enhanced transparency in operations. Such transparency in the various departments and operations has brought employees together, easing the endeavors to meet the company’s objectives significantly.

9. Invest time in pre-planning

You would want your managers to welcome the business development strategies that you frame without any hesitations. It would be better to do proper research and gather important information ahead of your strategic planning. When you have a well-thought plan beforehand, it can help you gain greater control over your choices, resulting in a positive outcome.

10. Make your strategies flexible

Every strategy you form for your business should be amendable. This characteristic comes useful when you wish to make changes to them due to unexpected changes in the business trend, customer’s preferences, or results being different from what you expected. Ensure that you always have a Plan B for the things that don’t go accordingly with your Plan A. This way, you might achieve an increased success rate in implementing your strategies and successfully meeting the organization’s objectives. 

To sum up!

To conclude, a company should incorporate a business strategy to bring together all their employees working towards the set target while keeping things transparent at all levels. A company must ensure that its business strategies are swift, well-planned, and fact-based, supported by a backup plan if things don’t go as expected.

Read more: 5 Features of InfinCE that will Transform The Way You Work 

If, at any level, your business development strategy requires the help of IT management, private IT infrastructure, cloud migration and data management, custom dashboards, and collaboration or productivity tools, reach out to InfinCE. Here, industry-trained professionals devise the best business strategy for your organization.

How can businesses gain a competitive advantage with Virtual Private Servers?

As more businesses take the digital route to beating competition, there is an increasing demand for Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology. It is becoming the number one hosting choice for businesses that experience very dynamic digital operations that peak and subside in a matter of hours or days.

For those who are new to the concept, a VPS is a virtual server dedicated to your business, but hosted on the cloud and managed by an underlying hypervisor that facilitates a portion of a physical server and associated computing resources to be allocated exclusively for a tenant. A VPS may be hosted and managed in a physical machine that also hosts other VPS and the entire ecosystem is made available on cloud by a cloud service provider or a hosting service provider.

Read more: 3 Strong Reasons for Your Business to Embrace Cloud-based IT Services

This VPS can be used by businesses to host a variety of digital platforms. So why has this technology of VPS having so many takers today? Here are 5 benefits of VPS that make it a formidable choice for businesses of all kinds:

1. Cost-Effective

Investing in a dedicated (private) server infrastructure would take costs through the roof. For small and medium businesses, this is not a luxury they can focus on since IT budgets would have to be optimized. With virtual private servers, SMBs get access to all the benefits of a private server on an on-demand pricing model where they only pay for the resources utilized. This helps them keep costs down and save on capital and salary expenses that would have to be borne had they decided to build a dedicated server infrastructure on their own and hire staff to maintain it.

2. Instant Scalability

Just as with cost, a Virtual Private Server based service offers businesses the desired flexibility in scaling their server performance and resources on demand. For example, a peak shopping season would require an e-commerce business to increase their computing and storage bandwidth on their servers to accommodate large spikes in traffic. The traffic may subside within a few weeks or months and then there would only be a normal flow of traffic to their website. Hence, it is not advisable to buy expensive server power to meet the demand for just a short period of time. With VPS, you can keep aside the tension of having to scale your server infrastructure due to demand without worrying about yearly costs. 

VPS service providers offer intuitive on-demand scalable packages for servers that allow you to subscribe for additional resources like bandwidth, storage, and computing power for limited periods to accommodate spikes in demand.

3. Reliability and Performance

The other option that has been popular with businesses for hosting their digital infrastructure was shared hosting. But this came with heavy reliability and performance issues. When the same infrastructure is shared by multiple businesses, spikes in traffic to other businesses can impact the availability of server resources to your business. 

With VPS, this problem is solved easily as your dedicated virtual space and computing space in the physical machine is abstracted and made available to you exclusively and is independent of the workload other businesses may exert on the same hardware. Hence businesses relying on VPS to run their critical digital infrastructure can be assured of reliability, high performance, and continuous availability all through the year.

Read more: How IT Teams Can Prepare to Support Remote Workforce During COVID-19

4. Customizable Configuration and Control

A shared hosting service does not offer businesses the flexibility to choose operational software on their server infrastructure. The configurations, operations control, software stack, etc. are all decided by the hosting service provider as they need to leverage the same machine for multiple businesses without any abstraction. This limits the freedom of hosting or operational technology for businesses in their digital platforms. 

With VPS, businesses are given full freedom to choose from a variety of operational software, hosting environments, and other added software installation support capability to build an environment best fit for their digital systems.

5. Managed Services

We have mentioned earlier that VPS does not require you to hire dedicated technical specialists to handle your IT infrastructure. Service providers like InfinCE offer a managed service wherein their specialists and consultants will continuously monitor the machinery and computing resources and network traffic to enable a seamless experience for your digital ecosystem. 

Read more: 5 Features of InfinCE that will Transform The Way You Work

You can continue to focus on improving your business via digital rather than worrying about keeping the backbone of your digital platforms stable and available. You are also relieved from having to invest continuously in upgrading infrastructure and software required to manage a private server for your digital platforms. The service provider will continuously monitor emerging market trends, evaluate their feasibility and ROI and make investments to ensure that your business gets access to the most competent server resources available in the market at no extra capital cost.

Read more: 4 Tips To Attain Success In The New Normal Remote Work Environment

As the world is continuously moving into a digital-first approach in every sector, SMBs need to have a firm grip on the digital ecosystem to keep their customers happy and satisfied. Having a fully integrated virtual digital backbone for your business with capabilities such as VPS is essential to ensure sustained growth. This is where InfinCE can be a game-changer. Get in touch with us to explore how your business can excel in the digital era with an all-in-one digital collaboration platform for all your needs.

5 Tips for Small Business Leaders to Stay Ahead of the Game in 2020

It is quite easy for a small business or startup to get immersed in the competition flooding the market and never really swim ashore. Those who want to survive and succeed in the storm needs to have a considerable idea of how to use successful strategies to win customers despite the competition. In 2020, if you were to seek tips on how to grow an SMB into a successful business, the most dominant answer you will receive is to invest in technology that can help you deliver better customer experiences and drive more revenue from your operational channels. Keeping this fact in mind, let us examine a few tips and ideas to help small business leaders remain on the top this 2020.

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

1. Building an automated business environment

Today you can empower your workforce to focus more on value-added jobs while mundane and repetitive tasks can be automated and seamlessly managed by innovative software. Automation can be implemented across every department in your small business, like Accounting, HR, Administration, Customer Relationships and much more. 

It does not replace human resources in any of these departments but provides you the flexibility to run these operations with limited resources and better efficiency. This will lead to lowered cost of operations as well as lesser managerial overhead and will ultimately provide better returns on your investment.

2. Intelligent Personalization for Customer Experience

Any business, small or big, needs to deliver an experience that customers would enjoy interacting with. However, with the rise of digital-savvy consumers, it is important to digitally transform your customer-facing operations as well. A simple example would be setting up an online retailing option for your small store wherein customers could place orders from the comfort of their homes through a web browser or even better, a dedicated smartphone app. 

In order to win an upper hand in the digital endeavor, small businesses need to rely on intelligent personalization for their customer service. Providing services or offerings based on factors such as budget, tailored offers, and discounts, geographical or demographic preferences, etc. will enhance your customers’ loyalty.

3. Smart Marketing

Small business leaders and startups face a need to garner attention from potential customers at the earliest after they have started business operations. Today, the fastest way to reach out to potential customers is through social media and other digital channels of interactive marketing. 

Using insights from a powerful CRM to drive efficient email campaigns and through intelligent sentiment analysis of your brand in social media, it becomes easier to win customers’ hearts. Powerful social media management and email automation tools can help you in reaching out to a large yet more qualified audience who have higher conversion chances.

4. AI-Driven Services

Artificial intelligence has become a mainstream technology today and is found in almost every consumer segment ranging from things as simple as a music app in our smartphone to highly sophisticated security systems. Small businesses are without a doubt, one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI evolution. 

With AI, they have the arsenal of serving more value for customers without having to spend heavily like established business houses. Things such as recommendations, automated customer service management via chatbots, the predictive forecasts for business revenue, etc. are all made possible by the implementation of AI platforms within the business.

5. Workforce Empowerment

The digital transformation wave that can propel your SMB into successful growth is not restricted to your customer-facing operations alone. Your employees are your biggest asset and brand promoters. Making their lives better through technology is a key factor in enabling sustainable growth in your business. 

Providing virtual spaces for teams to collaborate irrespective of their geographical location, powerful collaboration and communication platforms, secure file exchange systems, and intelligent marketing and sales automation systems contribute to making a seamless employee experience in your organization. When employees have access to the tools and digital channels, they need to work better, it ultimately creates a positive impact on the service they offer to your customers.

Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment

In today’s highly competitive market conditions, small business leaders and startups can use technology to grow sustainably and grab market share from established biggies. The only requirement here is to choose the right digital channels and a reliable partner to guide them in their digital transformation journey. With a proven track record of enabling digital transformation for some of the most successful small businesses worldwide, InfinCE can be the digital magic your business was waiting for. Get in touch with us to explore how.