Automation gives and takes, creates and destroys. While it forces businesses to remain agile and plan for disruption, it also offers those in the know and with the resources to implement them, opportunities to streamline and integrate business processes in ways that can have a major positive impact on the bottom line. Below are 4 essential IT investments to make in the age of automation.
Automation Testing
Many businesses are recognizing that in order to optimize their customers' experience and make doing business easy and pleasurable, they need to invest in proprietary app creation that greatly expands marketing and purchasing opportunities.
App development can be laborious, and apps tend to go through several if not dozens of iterations before being released to consumers. One important IT investment to make if you plan on putting a lot of time and effort into one or more app projects is automation testing procedures. These are designed to make sure any changes to your business' app are thoroughly tested and vetted for bugs and errors before officially becoming a part of the product without you having to exercise constant and tedious oversight.
Enterprise Automation Software
Enterprise automation involves the systematic review of all organizational processes to search out and isolate manual processes that could be improved and made more efficient, or replaced by AI and digital alternatives. There are IT specialists trained in these sorts of assessments as well as a wide range of software options that can be used.
With so much competition in a global digital economy, the drive for efficiency has become all-consuming. When enterprise-level automation and optimization is the industry norm, not keeping up puts you at real risk of losing market share.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is an IT process designed to help a business do three things: behavioural-based tracking of consumers and their habits; create tailored marketing experiences for visitors to a site; and integrate those two functionalities in order to highlight profit-making opportunities for an organization.
Marketing automation is still under-used, but it is in the process of revolutionizing businesses' approach to marketing. The end goal of an investment in marketing automation is the maximization of your customer experience. Experience is almost as important as the product or service itself, and automating the processes that analyze and decipher what makes customers buy is the key to most business' success.
CRM Automation
CRM automation is the process by which a business automates both customer service and sales functions so that all client-facing teams keep track of and manage their engagement with current and potential customers. For growing businesses in the age of automation, high-functioning CRM systems are a crucial part of ensuring an organization-wide concerted effort towards designing and implementing demographic-specific customer engagement.
CRM systems can be bought outright or purchased as a SaaS that comes with monthly subscription fees.
Conclusion
The more business goes digital, the more a digital strategy, including strategic investments in key information technology, becomes essential. It is getting to the point where it is simply not possible to grow and compete without a constant focus on automation efforts and maximizing efficiency.
Not only that, but consumers are coming to expect personalized buying and marketing experiences that take their needs and preferences into consideration. Add to that fierce global competition and a relentless drive towards enterprise-wide efficiency, and you have every reason to carefully contemplate a number of crucial IT investments.
