All too often, companies can regard IT as a hindrance, either too slow or too complex to assist in business development. But such a perspective fails to take in the opportunities your IT can offer, which, if properly exploited, can genuinely benefit profitability.
So how can your business ensure your IT is contributing to your bottom line?
Building frameworks for efficiency
Efficiency is crucial to keeping operating costs low. The less time, effort and resources your business expends on routine tasks, the greater your profit margin.
Properly specified and configured IT can help you build frameworks and processes that help reduce wastage. If your businesses uses a CRM system to store information about leads, you could set up a workflow to capture new enquiries made via your website and automatically create a reminder for one of your sales team to follow the new lead up.
Automating a basic operation like this can add up, over the course of a year, to a saving of hours, or even days of added productivity. Automation also helps to reduce the amount of manual data copying between systems, simultaneously reducing the opportunity for errors to be introduced into your data.
The power of your company data
Your company data is a powerful asset, a veritable goldmine of information that can be segmented, analysed and reviewed to reveal new customer insights and opportunities. Selling to existing customers is famously far more profitable than only targeting new leads, so the insights you can use from previous transactions and communications will help you build more effective marketing campaigns, or develop new products and services.
But to extract this information, you need an IT system that can collate and analyse data from multiple sources. If necessary, consider investing in a whole new system, or having a systems integrator link multiple platforms to facilitate automated data transfer and synchronisation. Any investment in data analysis services is sure to help improve company profitability in the long-term.
Maintain what you already have
Although investing in new systems and technology can yield impressive benefits, it may be possible to create savings using your existing IT environment. Consider commissioning a full IT audit to assess your current assets in full.
Routine maintenance plays an extremely important part in helping keep system “healthy”, maximising performance and reducing downtime. When your valuable data is always available, and can be quickly accessed and manipulated, your staff will waste less time waiting for screens to update or files to copy.
Maintenance is also crucial to extending the lifespan of your hardware, keeping it usable for longer. By increasing the time between IT hardware renewals, you will be able to realise a greater return on investment, again boosting profit margins.
IT may not be the only factor in boosting your company’s bottom line, but it can play an important part, becoming a strategic asset rather than being just another cost centre. For help and advice about getting more value from your IT investments, contact the Broadband Cloud Solutions team today.
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