Feel Like Your Business is Stuck in the 80s? 3 Technologies That Can Bring It Up to Speed

The election of Ronald Reagan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prince Charles marrying Lady Diana and Michael Jackson’s release of Thriller are some of the key events that a lot of people remember about the 80s. While plenty of people have fond memories of this decade, that doesn’t mean you want to continue living in it. Additionally, it doesn’t mean you want your business and its operations to be stuck in that decade either.

              

Thanks to the power of Moore’s Law, technology has come a long way over the last few decades. It’s hard to believe that while car phones and cellphones were considered a luxury item in the eighties, there are now around six billion cellphone subscriptions. As evidenced by every event that Apple holds, while plenty of consumers are willing to jump on the latest and greatest tech bandwagon, that doesn’t mean businesses move as quickly when it comes to adopting new technology.

There is something to be said for businesses holding off to ensure a new technology is going to be around for the long-haul. The last thing any business owner wants to do is invest a significant amount of money in a new technology, only to have it go the way of Betamax. That being said, there’s a big difference between caution and stubbornness. There comes a point when the only logical choice for a business is to upgrade to a new technology.

If you feel like your business is behind the technological curve but you are open to change, here are three proven but still very current technologies that you should strongly consider adopting for your business:

Cloud CRM

             

Using a spreadsheet to track leads? Or have a CRM but using one that requires the database to be manually updated? In either case, you can save a lot of time and make your team far more efficient by converting to a cloud version of this tool. Like most cloud tools, the big advantage of this technology is it ensures everyone on your team will always have the latest information about leads and current customers.

VoIP

Gone are the days of needing to invest an excessive amount of time or capital just to have a phone system that meets your business needs. Instead of being chained to outdated options, it’s now easy to upgrade and enjoy everything that a business VoIP system has to offer.

                 

Two of the biggest advantages of this business technology are its flexibility and having the ability to get voicemail anywhere you want. If you decide to move forward with this option and start comparing VoIP providers, one of the most important things you’ll want to look for is around the clock customer support. In the event something goes wrong, you want to be able to get in touch with someone who can resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

In addition to customer support, some of the other features you’ll want to look for are an extension number, Internet backend to manage customizations, 3-way calling, call waiting and call transfer. Other potential features include voicemail to email integration, hold music and a telephony toolbar.

WordPress

Even though the Internet was around in the 80s, most businesses didn’t have a website. However, by the mid-90s, that started to change. Unfortunately, plenty of websites still look like they were designed 15 to 20 years ago. If your business has a website but you don’t feel it offers the experience you want to deliver to online visitors, it’s time for an overhaul.

Doing a Google search for website builders and platforms will give you a seemingly endless list of options. But even though there’s no shortage of options, that doesn’t mean they all deliver the same quality. The reality of website builders is a large percentage of these tools create websites that are either ugly or severely lacking in features.

If you want to cut through all the noise and choose a platform that’s going to provide an awesome website, you can’t go wrong with WordPress. Not only is it fairly easy to create a site that looks great, but thanks to the flexible design of this platform, it’s easy to add content or features to your site on an ongoing basis. And because it’s arguably the most popular platform in the world, finding great developers and designers for it isn’t very hard to do.

As you can see from the above examples, once you start focusing on getting your company’s technology up to speed, you’ll find that these upgrades can really help your business.

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