Businesses spend millions on marketing each year in an attempt to look different from the competition. While marketing will always remain essential, technology offers endless opportunities to create differentiators that put real space between you and your competitors.
How Technology Affects Competitive Advantage
Many companies believe they must make massive changes and large investments to reap the advantages of changing technology. This isn’t true, although organizations that adopt software solutions not suited to their company struggle to adapt and actually create a disadvantage.
Before diving into any big technology purchases, we recommend working with a strategic managed IT provider (like Micro Visions!) to gain an edge without creating problems. Here are a few ideas:
Commoditized Businesses
These companies can have the most difficulty when it comes to separating from similar competitors. Your winning strategy comes from paying attention to fine details and executing your business processes a bit better than the next company. Focus on locating a specialized line-of-business application that improves performance in your operations or gives your users a better experience – anything from business analytics tools to industry-specific software.
Work with a managed IT services provider to review your business processes and identify technology solutions that give you a competitive advantage. You’ll be able to maximize the potential of any application.
Creative Businesses
Companies providing creative services should look for opportunities to improve collaboration among their workforce. It can be easy to allow workers to drift into silos, leading to breakdowns when pulling multiple pieces of a project together into one cohesive deliverable.
Collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams increase productivity, enhance the creative process and reduce project timelines by bringing team members together to work in real time.
Out-in-the-Field Businesses
Many businesses require their workers to leave the office; for example, real estate agents showing houses or cable technicians repairing damaged lines. The right mobile solutions can successfully support employees who are not bound to a specific office location.
For example, a field technician can record incidents and their real-time repair process rather than take paper notes to decipher later. The technician can then take care of more repairs each day because they’re operating more efficiently. Real estate agents can lead virtual tours of a home to multiple clients using an iPad. As a result, she sells more properties. These are simple cases, where one piece of technology changes the game.
Getting Beyond Strategy: How Working with a Managed IT Provider Helps
Getting the right strategy with a managed IT provider like Micro Visions will give you a competitive edge and facilitate your growth. Our team of professionals will:
- Recommend solutions that make sense for your specific business. No one-size-fits-all model here. The solution needs to adapt to your culture or be able to facilitate a smooth, minimally disruptive transition.
- Create customized options. Looking to technology for a competitive advantage sometimes requires out-of-the-box thinking. An expert IT partner like Micro Visions can help you create new inputs for your website, integrate applications to the cloud and update applications for better mobile viewing.
- Coordinate and implement solutions. We work with your key stakeholders, vendors and staff to ensure solutions benefit your company culture and customer experience.
Your technology should be doing a lot more for your business. Contact Micro Visions online or call (616) 776-0400 to set up a no-commitment consultation.
