5 Cost-Effective Ways Tech can Increase Startup Productivity

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: launching a startup is a costly project, and there is no guarantee that you won’t go under in the first three to five years. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many great things you can do to maximize your chances of success, avoid the common pitfalls, and break even as quickly as possible so that you can start actually earning money. Because remember, the top talent you’ve brought to the company won’t stay just because you have an amazing company culture - you also need to hand out some paychecks.

Luckily, and most importantly, one of the most cost-effective solutions for a startup is to hop on the tech bandwagon and integrate as many effective tech solutions as possible. This will help you minimize financial expenditure and time waste, allocate resources more efficiently, build your brand, reduce employee and customer turnover, and much more. Without further ado, here are the five tech solutions you need to improve your startup’s chances in the competitive market.

Use technology to improve the onboarding process

As you already know, there are two types of onboarding: employee onboarding, and client/customer onboarding. The former requires you to invest time and money training your new employees to become productive members of your team through proper education that involves your HR specialists, and leaders from specific departments – such as sales, customer support, or marketing. The latter, of course, requires you to invest in educating your new clients on how to use your products or integrate your services and solutions into their own business operations.

Needless to say, you can cut a lot of the repetitive tasks and reduce the human-power needed to create an effective onboarding process by integrating automation and smart software. For your new employees, you can create automated tutorials relating to their new job position, help them fill out the paperwork quickly and deliver it straight into the cloud, and give them a tour of the company’s culture.

For your clients and customers, guided online tutorials coupled with AI-driven chatbot technology are near-perfect solutions that will get your clients up to speed, and teach them how to use your services or products.

Optimize finances across the board

There are many ways technology can save a struggling startup in a competitive industry and help it stay afloat over the long term. Seeing as how money is the one thing a typical startup doesn’t have readily available in the first year(s) of its existence, it’s important that you integrate numerous solutions to maximize profit while minimizing expenditure. Firstly, use payroll software to optimize the payroll process and cut extraneous expenses from every paycheck.

Next, be sure to automate the invoicing process and opt for digital invoices only. What’s more, be sure to integrate a direct debit payment solution to ensure that you’ll get paid on time every month without having to chase your clients around the web and potentially jeopardize your relationship.

Use online tools to get your business up and running

In order to maximize your startup’s potential in the early days, you need to act fast, and you need to take care of all administrative and legal tasks quickly in order to get your company up and running as soon as possible. With that in mind, be sure to leverage all online tools to skip the arduous administrative processes in the offline world.

Aspiring entrepreneurs are, therefore, increasingly opting to register a business online instead of offline in order to get all of the necessary paperwork delivered within minutes instead of weeks, and open up their business at exactly the right time with minimal financial waste. Use the same mindset to obtain all of the necessary permits and licenses in order to enter the market on your terms.

Leverage machine learning for long-term growth

Nowadays, companies in every industry in the world use big data analytics and machine learning to collect and collate vast amounts of important data, and transform it into actionable reports. The truth is that, if you want to remain relevant for years to come, you have to stay one step ahead of the game, and you can only achieve that by predicting the trends in your industry, and anticipating the needs of your demographic. With that in mind, it’s important that you use machine learning from the very start in order to discover new opportunities in your niche, and build your competitive advantage.

Integrate chatbot technology to improve CX

Lastly, every business nowadays needs a chatbot. Whether it’s a simple piece of software that will tend to some repetitive tasks, or if it’s an AI-powered solution that will funnel leads and take over the bulk of the work over at customer support, chatbot technology can do a lot of things for your brand.

For one, a chatbot can improve the sales cycle by making personalized recommendations, upselling products and services, and making better offers to customers that have second thoughts. Secondly, a chatbot can take over a lot of the grunt work in customer service, and allow your human agents to focus on the more complex task – in turn, all of this will lead to improved customer satisfaction while minimizing financial expenditure.

Wrapping up

We might live in an entrepreneurial age, but that doesn’t mean that launching a startup is not a cumbersome, risky, and oftentimes daunting task. Aside from the many other decisions you as a business leader can make that will improve your startup’s chances in the field, you should also use these tech tips and solutions to ensure the growth of your company in a safe and efficient way.

Elaine Bennett is a digital marketing specialist and a regular contributor for Bizzmark Blog. She writes hands-on articles about business and marketing, as it allows her to reach more people and help them on their business journey.