With so many technology solutions to evaluate, it can be hard to know which is right for your business at every stage of its life.
As a business owner, your priorities typically range from team to operations to growth — but honing your technology stack on the backend may not always be at the top of your list. This is why innovative, scalable, and simple-to-use technology solutions are key to your success.
You’re already halfway there if you’ve started implementing technology to support your business model. But if it isn’t working out as you had hoped, here are five ways your tech could be holding your business back — and how you can get it right.
1. Your tech doesn’t meet your business needs
You should always consider how each piece of technology will benefit your overall business operations. Needs-based decision-making is a great starting point when determining how technology can fill a gap in your business. Begin by determining the problem you’re solving, who the technology will impact (end-users), and how it can scale with your business as it grows. From there, look at the tactical criteria such as pricing, contracting, support, and implementation time.
Making poorly informed decisions can have more ramifications than you might anticipate. Short-term impacts like loss of organisational time for team training and implementation pale in comparison to the long-term financial and legal implications of reneging on hastily-signed lock-in contracts.
2. Your tech isn’t keeping up with you
Your business may be fast-paced, but if your technology can’t keep up, it could impact both your customer service and your bottom line.
The hospitality industry is a prime example of an environment where speed is paramount – equally with payment acceptance and funds settlement. Customers expect excellent service, and they want it now. If you can’t accept a card payment because your connectivity has dropped out, or your payment solutions deliver slow processing speeds, queues will grow, and profits will fall.
When it comes to funds settlement, speed is just as critical to the bottom line. In today’s digitised world, bars and restaurants should have payment solutions to enable same-day deposits, 365 days of the year, for their businesses to accelerate their cash flow.
3. Your internal operations are siloed
If you’re accepting payments through one solution and then managing your business transaction accounts and expenses through another, you’re siloing your finance and operations teams — and not getting the benefit of a fully integrated view of your overall business finances. This is where Zeller’s solution has helped businesses by building a stronger bridge between the front-of-house and back-of-house teams — the team on the venue team are processing payments, and the finance team have full visibility of payments, deposits and profit in real-time. This removes the need for hard copy reporting and means those teams are less siloed.
This challenge has been faced increasingly by businesses over the past years. With more workforces working remotely, cloud-based solutions are enabling greater collaboration for teams to work seamlessly work together while they’re remote. An example of a tool our teams at Zeller uses is Figma, a web-based design solution that allows all teams to make updates to designs for products, marketing and the web, and then view and collaborate on these projects together in real-time. Cloud-based solutions that allow collaboration ensure our teams are never siloed or working without collaboration.
4. Your tech is too quickly becoming outdated
If tech isn’t your core focus, it’s easy to fall behind on the newest innovations and product iterations, but with new and innovative players coming to the table every day, ensuring your tech is up to date will keep you in the competition.
Opt for tools that easily integrate with other solutions in your tech stacks and don’t require manual updates. Having a centralised view of your go-to tools will help you automate and streamline various key business processes, saving you and your team valuable time every day.
5. A lack of scalability is holding you back
Consider taking a leaf out of the fast-moving fintech industry’s book by replacing clunky infrastructure with intelligent, automated software that doesn’t tie you down — and enables you to scale at pace. The tech tools you choose should not only be scalable but flexible to suit your unique business needs. At Zeller, we made 139 updates to our products in our first 100 days post-launch to help our customers scale in a way traditional banks could not.
Although the shift towards a hybrid environment has triggered significant technological innovation, this is just the beginning. The success of your business will always rely on technology in some way, so you must find the solutions that propel you forward rather than hold you back. Whether that means prioritising partnerships with technology providers that share your values for customer service or simplifying your tech stack to give you and your team time back in the day to focus on doing what you love, making small steps to futureproof your business, will pay dividends in the years to come.
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