5 Ways To Scale Your Software Business
By Rahul Varshneya, Arkenea
This five-time entrepreneur explains how leveraging technology can take your own tech company to the next level.
The business processes followed in the initial stages of your startup vary from those that need to be followed when your company is ready to scale. Technology can get your business running more efficiently and help you scale your startup.
Entrepreneurs have more options than ever when it comes to choosing technology for helping the business sustain a growth period. The key lies in selecting technology that offers long-term benefits and justifies the investments made in securing the solutions. The tech tools should be able to increase productivity by helping employees get more work done in the time available, generate more revenue, and increase profit margins, while also contributing to customer satisfaction.
Here are five of the ways you can scale your business by leveraging technology.
1. Unlock The Power Of The Web
Mobility and remote accessibility are essential to business success. While having a location-specific business might have seemed to be the best option while starting out, having a wider presence becomes critical when your startup is looking to scale.
If your business still doesn’t have a digital presence in this day and age, you are missing out on a number of growth opportunities. One of our clients discovered the power of digitization firsthand when they took their traditional offline business model over to the web. Using a tech platform to scale and building a digital presence via a web application helped them expand beyond the geographical boundaries and physical business limitations.
You don’t need to have a tech background to unlock the power of the web. From build-it-yourself platforms to custom software development agencies, there are plenty of options available at your disposal.
2. Customer Relationship Management Software
No matter which industry vertical your business operates in, sales forms the backbone of your business. Managing customer relationships and leveraging existing customer data to make business decisions can help you to scale. This is where CRM software comes into play. It helps you streamline communications with the customers, keep track of all your appointments, plus build and manage your sales pipeline. A good CRM software helps align the customer expectations with your offerings through clear communication and helps nurture those client relationships. It also helps promote collaboration among the members of the sales team by making the customer data available to every member on the team. This bringing transparency in the sales process, and thus making selling more efficient.
It also allows you to make better informed, data-driven decisions. By utilizing advanced analytics techniques on historical customer data, CRM tools give you valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. Acting upon these insights and being equipped with critical knowledge of customer needs and wants can be a game changer when your business is in the process of scaling.
3. Automate Your Business Processes
Automation of the routine and repetitive tasks frees up your employees’ time and enables them to focus on the tasks that require critical thinking and creativity. Automation results in optimal usage of business resources, which is a prerequisite for scaling. Of course, this is easier said than done. Identifying the processes that can be automated requires an internal audit of your business. Identify the tasks that are repetitive in nature and would result in significant savings of resources for the company if they were eliminated/automated.
Automation of the routine processes also comes at a significant initial investment, so a cost-benefit analysis to justify the setup costs is necessary before deciding how to move forward. While the one-time setup costs may seem high, the long-term benefits of process automation are often significantly higher.
4. Artificial Intelligence And Chatbots
Customers are the primary reason for your business presence. In order for the business to scale and gain a strong market presence, customer service and satisfaction is essential. Managing customer inquiries and resolving their issues personally isn’t much of a challenge when you are starting out.
When you are looking to scale, handing huge volumes of inquiries pouring in is going to take up too much of your customer service team’s time. It would also cause significant delays in resolution of the issues, thus negatively affecting customer satisfaction and retention. Hiring additional personnel, along with their training and development, comes at significant costs.
Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence in the form of chatbots has the potential to streamline client communication and result in an enhancement in customer experience. AI algorithms can be so trained that chatbots reply to the common client queries 24x7, resulting in instant resolution of matters. Bots also can act like a triage where the complicated queries are handed over to the customer service reps to be handled.
As the business scales, the number of customers would also increase. Chatbots are the cost-effective and time-saving way to deal with the challenge of ensuring customer satisfaction as you grow.
5. Team Integration With Technology
Communication among the members of the team is necessary for strong performance. When you are in the startup stage, the team is relatively smaller and establishing channels of communication doesn’t pose a significant challenge. It’s only when you scale in size and increase the number of employees that communication becomes a difficulty.
As new employees come on board, you might need to make a move toward cloud computing. Cloud-based systems allow for remote sharing of data from any given place at any given time. This is vital to your growth if you plan on including the freedom to work remotely in your plan to scale. As the world is leaning toward a culture of gig economy, hiring a remote team or giving them the freedom to work remotely is essential to retain talent within the organization. Cloud computing needs to become an indispensable part of your scaling plans in such cases.
There are also a number of team integration products available in the market to ensure seamless communication. Your business needs to adapt to changes that result from growing number of employees as you scale, and technology can help you bridge the gaps as you grow.
About The Author
Rahul Varshneya is the cofounder and President of Arkenea and Benchpoint. He has been featured as a business technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, and Inc., among others.