5 Top Tips to Recession-Proof Your Business with Technology

How to Recession-Proof Your Business in 2023

The word ‘recession’ strikes fear into the hearts of both business owners and the general public alike. It’s understandable. The path of destruction a recession can leave in its wake can be detrimental and even fatal for businesses who struggle to adapt. The current economic climate has raised a lot of issues already with prices increasing across energy, water and other utilities, as well as consumer goods, retail stock and more. With a recession looming, it’s understandable for most businesses can fall victim to one of two harmful mindsets:

• Continue their business as normal and hope for the best

or

• Employ knee-jerk reactions and making changes and cuts without any real strategy

 

The best route a business can take is to strategise how they are going to cope with a recession, sooner rather than later, and set plans in place to deal with the current situation and emerge in a strong position when economic conditions have improved. As a business, we know how hard an economic downturn can be, but as a technology provider, we also know how you can leverage solutions and cut down on overspending to help your business through the tough times. Here are our 5 top tips to recession-proof your business.

 

1) How Much is Your Business Spending?

 

 

Similar to managing a household during an unpredictable economic climate, the first step is to analyse what you are spending and identify any areas where strategic cut-backs can be made and unnecessary expenditure can be avoided. Monitoring how much your business is spending and what you’re spending it on can help you to not only identify areas where you can cut costs, but also help you to be more mindful in the future to avoid unnecessary spending.

 

When it comes to your technology, if you’ve been relying on certain solutions within your business for a while now without reviewing their cost or the value they are providing, there may be a chance that you’ve been overspending on those solutions. Taking the time to assess your current technology and the associated costs to power and manage this technology may provide an opportunity to identify areas for cost cutting. Working with a knowledgeable provider will make this process easier, as they will be able to let you know of better deals that are available to you or advise on solutions that are costing your business money unnecessarily.

 

2) Nurture Customer Relationships

 

In time of economic turmoil, your business relies on customer loyalty more than ever. Utilise technology to gain better customer insights that enable you to make operational improvements to offer the best customer experience possible. If your business is relying on legacy technology, not only will these outdated solutions cost you more money in the long run, they don’t provide insights that are as detailed as digital solutions.

 

Switching from legacy telephone systems to internet-based VoIP phone systems will provide access to more features that go beyond voice, alongside analytics and detailed insights into customer journeys with your business. You can see where your customer experience is excelling and identify points for improvement, so your customers feel that they are being taken care of and are less likely to leave.

 

3) Improve Operations with Automation

 

Complicated internal processes cost your business both time and money. If your operations still rely on team members completing lots of manual tasks, this will end up costing you money in the long run, as they are distracted from tasks that bring your business higher value. Moving operations, such as invoicing, security and payroll over to the cloud will allow you to take advantage of more advanced applications and programmes and automate processes to streamline payment journeys, allowing you to process payments quicker. Recession brings about delayed payments, so nailing your invoicing process is vital to stay on top. Automating your invoicing process allows you to issue them more quickly and keep a closer eye on overdue payments in order to act quicker.

 

Automation can improve your business’s performance by reducing errors. With processes and operations involving less room for error, your customers can receive service that is of a higher quality and faster too.

4) Boost Resilience with Stronger Security

 

 

Taking advantage of cloud solutions to bolster your security will facilitate better resilience by protecting you from a crisis during a period where your business needs to keep its head above the water. Cloud data backup, storage, automated security monitoring and disaster recovery measures can all help to ensure that you’re less likely to fall victim to a data breach or security disaster on top of trying to run your business during a recession. Through using the power of the cloud, you’re reducing your resilience on local networks, meaning you may be able to decrease your onsite infrastructure and the costs involved in maintaining it.

 

5) Recession-Proof By Investing Digital Transformation

 

You may be thinking – ‘you’re telling me to invest money to prevent losing money?’ – and you would be right to think that, because we are. This may seem counter intuitive; however digital technology provides flexible and agile solutions to help your business to be more adaptable. Traditional legacy solutions, like onsite storage and PSTN-reliant business phone systems are expensive and difficult to customise to your businesses needs. With digital solutions like cloud computing, VoIP phone systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), you have access to advanced technology that is flexible and easily adapts to the changing needs of your business and, although it is an investment, you only pay for what you use. If the amount of team members reduce, you can reduce the amount of users that you’re paying for and, if the amount increases, you can easily add in new user accounts. Finally, the varied advantages of digital solutions providing enhanced customer experiences and streamlining workloads, allowing operations to become more efficient means you will see a return on your investment, whilst recession-proofing your business.

 

 

Recession-Proof Your Business with Digital Solutions From Elite

 

Whether you have concerns about how the recession may affect your business or are looking to find technology solutions to recession-proof your business, our friendly, highly-knowledgeable team of specialists are here to help. From helping you to start your digital journey to identifying opportunities and solutions to help your business to grow and flourish, you can rely on us to provide a service that is tailored to your needs.

 

Contact us today and let’s work together to recession-proof your business with digital solutions.