By Kapil Rana, Founder and Chairman, HostBooks
Perhaps the human would hardly forget the pain and sufferings they came across due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The terrible virus spread crashed economic growth, compelled people to stay at their homes, death, and hunger were far worse than one has ever expected. Small businesses, traders, retailers from tier-II 2 and tier-III cities are also not untouched by this. Even businesses like retail trade, transporting and warehousing, real estate construction, management, and companies have been affected the worst and are still overcoming the adverse circumstances. Startup businesses have no say, they are either closed or ready and waiting for the right time to start.
Small and medium enterprises like consumer products industries, retail shops, fashion, and groceries can go fully digital to adapt to changed consumer’s behavior post Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, from selling products online to sending e-invoice to consumer’s mobile phones, business owners can greatly use digital technologies and obtain their objective with the contactless business process.
Taking a pause and speaking honestly, SMEs should not just focus on surviving in the Covid-19 pandemic with the right use of technology, but also they should keep an eye on what lies ahead of the pandemic. In business it is correctly connoted that ‘time is money and money is time’ and the adoption of modern age technologies allows you to effectively utilise time and resources. With changing business trends, SMEs must adopt the technologies on which business will lie ahead. Let’s take a look at some of the technologies that SMEs in small cities can make use of and thrive.
Business personalisation
Gone are the days when businesses sent an email to the customers with their name and call it personalisation. Today, it’s been extended to websites, detailed emails, and text messages across devices such as PC, smartphones, and tablets. It gives an engaging experience to the customers by ensuring that the needs of customers are appropriately addressed. By means of personalisation, we measure everything to have a deep understanding of customers and then give personalised experiences to them.
Improving business process with latest technologies
Today, customers like to avail the services in a hassle-free way and there are new technologies that could better help you achieve this objective. Technologies like Artificial intelligence, bot, and SaaS applications, cybersecurity, etc can manage your business processes like financial management, data management, human resources management, and sales management more efficiently. There are all in one product available in the market that are capable of taking care of the full value chain of the business being its digitisation of the backend of the business, reporting and analytics of business or compliance management and moreover the whole business banking process. These tools allow business and business owners to take control of the business and circumstance and help in taking quick and efficient business decisions.
Internet of things
In simple words, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the physical devices that are connected through the internet, collecting and sharing data. Now, the answer that lies in our interest is it can also collect and share data related to your business.
Such technologies are greatly helping SMEs or big businesses to develop self regulatory techniques for monitoring and operating a wide range of business and manufacturing processes. Thus, businesses can use IoT data to access valuable insights into the customer’s flow and other operations.
Machine Learning
Machine learning is not like the early days when its usages were limited to big enterprises. Today, its usages are widespread, not only in big enterprises but also in SMEs. It is now more versatile, agile, and easy to use. Taking its ability in simple terms, it can automatically calculate from complex mathematical calculations to big data over and over, faster and faster. Indeed, machine learning applications are widely being used in our day to day life. Machine learning coupled with AI can do miracles for any business be it process automation or business automation.