In the modern world, things are moving faster and more efficiently than ever before. Look around you, and you’ll find people tracking their fitness, their sleep, their commuting times, and their food or parcel deliveries. People use tech to manage their social and romantic lives and to book vacations and leisure activities.

Plus, as expected, technology is everywhere in business – from the moment you log in to your computer to the moment you close your laptop. But really modernizing – getting ahead of your competitors – means researching the best technologies. Here, we’ve done it for you, helping you get ahead in the race to modernize effectively.

Objectives

Before you set out on your modernizing mission, it’s important to take stock of what you’re trying to achieve. One of the most useful and revealing ways to set objectives is to hold a meeting with your senior staff and ask them about all the frustrations they have in the work they do. What’s a pain point, or what’s clearly inefficient? How are you losing or disappointing customers and clients? What could make you so much faster? If only there was a computer program out there made just to help your firm? Gather this information to decide which weaknesses in your firm you’re setting out to plug with brilliant technology and processes.

Process Change

While we’re on the subject of changing processes, it’s important to note that technology isn’t necessarily a panacea. You can’t just throw money and technological solutions at a problem and expect it to resolve itself without some thoughtfulness and creativity on the part of managers. Instead, consider this journey as two tracks running in tandem. On one track are modern technologies that you can use to boost your productivity and modernize your firm. On the other are management techniques and system changes you can instigate to work best with these technologies. Only changes on both tracks will see your firm rocketing off into higher productivity.

Hardware

So, with those key stipulations set, it’s time to take a tour of what’s out there for businesses looking to modernize. And the obvious place to start is with hardware. It’s here that you’ll be able to run programs faster and support more advanced software. The better quality of computer, the faster the workers. So there’s really no excuse not to purchase expensive, high-grade business computers for your entire team. Do your research and choose those computers that are built to last. If they’re used every single day, they’re likely to experience wear and tear, and you’re looking for longevity as well as speed.

HR Software

Now we turn our attention to the software out there in the modern business world. We’ll start with HR software, which has been adapted and perfected over the past decade or so to run beautifully within modern organizations, helping HR teams to track employee productivity and wellbeing while at the same time delivering entirely new insights, such as transparently showing who’s working on what – and when – in your firm. Here, look to powerful solutions such as Zenefits HR software, which is easy to plug into your existing HR team and will help them intuitively manage their workload, delivering new insights that’ll help your business grow and profit in the future.

Task Automation

As with HR software, one of the key benefits of these programs is that they target teams and tasks and that they’re built to automate certain roles in your company. To give the HR example, there was a time when HR professionals had to laboriously check which worker had worked which days in order to ensure payment was correctly allocated. That could take hundreds of hours a year. Now, it’s all automated with software solutions.

The very same can be said of department-specific software across the board. Think of a team in your firm, and there’s likely a software solution out there that helps automate the tasks you find most boring and least rewarding. The great thing about automation software is it liberates those workers to work on tasks higher up the value chain, which means you’ll have more labor on more high-skilled tasks that deliver profit to your firm.

Finances and Accounting

If you’re excited about the productivity gains you’ve already come across in this article, you’re going to want to find a way to track them. And happily, one of the modern software fields that are most developed and intuitive comes in the form of financial tracking. With real-time data showing where you are in relation to your sales and revenue targets, you’re able to, over time, make far better predictions as to where you ought to throw your resources as you come to the end of the month. However, more importantly, you’re able to see what happens when you add new software to your teams – tracking day-by-day the improvements it makes to your workers, their productivity, and – ultimately – your bottom line.

Customer Service

One of the departments in businesses that have always had to be gigantic is customer services. It’s here that you can quickly snowball your workforce into several dozen operatives sat by the phones and on the computers, awaiting calls through to your customer services desk. This is great for the consumer – being able to get through to someone who can help them with their query – but it’s terrible for the company, which has to pay several wages just for one relatively small area of the business.

There is a solution. Chatbots and automation have taken care of customer services to a large extent, helping you map the most frequent questions and complaints against a matrix that chatbots guide customers down. As that guidance takes place, with Yes/No answers provided by customers, you’ll find that most queries can be responded to entirely via automation. And you can use these bots not just on your website but on social media and over the phone, too.

Website

It is your website that is the digital front page of your firm. And that means that any effort to modernize cannot take place without a good, hard look at your website. If you last updated your website over five years ago, it’s certain to look a little shabby by modern standards. Not only that, but the code that it’s built upon will be outdated, costing you views and clicks because your SEO rating will have dropped steadily over the years. An upgrade to your code is worth it for the boost in your SEO performance it delivers alone.

But there are more important objectives to manage with your website. It’s here that you can show your firm to be modern, digital-first, and trustworthy. You’re trying to demonstrate that you’re efficient and reliable and that customers and clients can be comfortable doing business with you. That’s why website modernization is so important – and why many of the world’s leading websites make changes to their interfaces, every couple of months. Complete a website audit and make changes yourself in order to boost the value of your key digital asset.

The tips outlined above scratch at the most productive surface of your digital modernization efforts. There will still be far more to do, but this gives you a taste of the avenues you can go down in order to make your firm more productive and profitable in 2022.