Go Back To The Future With Your Business

Keep your eyes on the future if you want your business to be successful. You need to work to make your company, innovative, exciting and most importantly fresh. If your business doesn’t feel fresh to customers, you will struggle to find demand for any products or services that you have to offer. You always need to stay ahead of the game, but looking to the future isn’t just about getting a great level of demand. It’s fair to say that the business industry can use new tech and ideas to reduce costs and create a more efficient company model. With that in mind, it’s possible to work to a point where bills are lower, and profits are a lot higher. So, let’s look at some of the future trends that will shape the business world and the buyers market in the next few years.

Labor Is Becoming Obsolete

It was Elon Musk who first suggested that the workforce would soon become obsolete. That’s thanks to new technology and software that allows everything to be completed without any manual labor input at all. An example of this would be invoicing. These days, you don’t need to hire an accountant to handle your invoices. Instead, you can get software that automates the entire process. It cuts down the transaction time and ensures that everything is taken care of in minutes. You can find out more from Dataserv and similar companies offering the same type of software. If you thought this was an exception, well, it’s fast becoming the rule.

Two months ago media outlets reported that restaurants across America had started to use robots to prepare the food. We don’t think it will be too long before there is automated tech serving it as well. After all, if you can get a car to drive by itself how hard would it be to create a device that could navigate a restaurant. We’re talking at least five years into the future here, but it’s definitely on the horizon.

So what does this automated tech mean for business owners? Well, there will certainly be a backlash. Think back to the early years of outsourcing where people became worried their job would be stolen by international workers. Now, people are going to be worried their job is going to be taken by robots. It is worth looking at your business model. Find an area where automation is a possibility because it will pay off. Labor is expensive and if you can cut it out, you should.

Flexi-Business

The flexible business model is already popular today, and there’s good reason for that. If your business is flexible, you will again be able to limit the costs. For instance, you might not have to run your company from an office at all. Instead, you can work from home which is great. Offices while useful, are incredibly expensive. You have to pay for the the bills, the maintenance and of course, the labor. It takes a lot of people to effectively run a business office.

But flexible businesses don’t just mean operated from home. They could be operated from anywhere. The main section of your business might be an office in London. But you’re in New York working from a laptop. It shouldn’t be surprising that this idea is popular with new business owners.

To make your business flexible, you need to be ready to invest in the latest technology. For instance, you should be using cloud servers. Cloud servers allow you to transfer information to clients, employees and business partners effortlessly. It ensures that you are maximizing your efficiency levels on the market and that’s important.

As well as tech, you need to make sure that everyone is connected. It’s so easy for a business that is flexible to become nonfunctional. This will simply be because the connections just aren’t there. You need to make sure that everyone is on the same page and knows their role in the company. One possibility would be to use a social network to do this. Instant messaging can be very useful because it means you get a response from employees – you guessed it – instantly.

9.6 Minutes

That’s how often you check your phone in a 24 hour day. On average after just under ten minutes you look at your cellphone. You want to check your emails, texts and perhaps even have a scroll through social media. So, the future is definitely mobile which is awesome for business owners because it opens up a brand new opportunity.

You always need to be looking for fresh ways to market to customers and consumers. The phone offers you an exciting way to do this with an app. In the future, every business is going to have an app. It’s such a simple way to market and connect with customers. You can look into an app development team right now and see what type of software you could use. Or, if you don’t want to make that type of commitment, how about just making sure your site is mobile responsive. This might be worth doing anyway. The Google algorithm has recently been updated to include mobile responsiveness. If your site isn’t responsive, you might get a lower search ranking. As you may know in the modern business world, that can be a real killer.

Content Is Key

Or king, whichever you prefer. The fact is that content is now your most powerful tool as a business owner. Using great content, you can get customers interested and ensure that they want to buy from your business. But the level of content online is growing at a phenomenal rate. And, now that marketers have caught onto the fact it’s a powerful tool, that’s not going to slow down. Thus, your content also needs to be exciting, fresh and original. Essentially, you need to be putting more emphasis on quality and less on quantity. Every piece of content you release should be designed to stand out and attract shares.

$83 Billion

That’s a rough estimate of how much revenue is lost every year by American business owners due to poor customer service. It’s crucial that you are delivering an excellent experience for your consumers. Otherwise, they’ll leave, and they won’t ever return. You might think that this is an exaggeration but just have a look at some of the reviews online. You’ll find negative reviews almost always relate to customer service. Either the wait was too long, or they didn’t feel valued. It may be that they simply weren’t happy with the manners on the other end of the phone. The good news is that you can eliminate these issues with technology.

First, you can again use instant messaging instead of a phone call to handle customer complaints. You can also think about using automated software. It is possible to get call handling software that can communicate with customers in the same way an employee would. But unlike an employee, a machine can’t’ be accused of being rude.

Doom And Gloom

While Donald Trump might be working to scale back any efforts made to reduce climate change, it might be worth ignoring the President in this case. Instead, you do still need to work hard to keep your company green. This isn’t just about saving money, it’s about saving the planet. That, in turn, will help you attract customers who are interested in buying from a green company.

Last year, thousands of businesses across the USA experienced power outages. Power companies warned that businesses needed to start reducing their power usage. Otherwise, there would be more cases like this in the future. In recent years pollution in some parts of the world has decreased while in others, it has grown phenomenally. But one thing is still clear. It’s always in the business owner’s best interest to keep things eco-friendly. This does mean the model will be more efficient, competitive and gives the company a chance at longevity.

In twenty-five years, the world is going to be facing serious issues that we’re not yet prepared for. Supply shortages, food shortages, water shortages and low levels of fossil fuels are all going to be prevalent issues. Businesses need to start preparing for these problems right now, cutting back as much as possible.

AR & VR

Finally, we need to look at another part of the future for technology. Right now, all eyes are focused on AR and VR. Both present unique, exciting ways to share information and content with customers. AR, in particular, is in high demand thanks to several high-profile success stories. In the future, you can expect AR to combine with biosensors and wearable tech to become automated. So, when you see an AR code, you won’t have to snap it with your phone. It will appear before your very eyes, as if by magic. What does this mean for business? Well, marketing is going to be a lot more exciting, and if you want to get ahead of the curve, you should jump on this bandwagon right now.