Decisions are the backbone of day-to-day life. As a business owner, you are well aware of the fact that your decisions have a direct impact on the success of your business. Therefore, it is only natural that you want the tools that will allow you to make more effective decisions.
In today’s day and age, technology is often the equipment that business owners rely on in their decision-making process, regardless if they work in managed IT services or other professional services. Whether you need help deciding what product you should invest in or if your staff would benefit from managed IT support, information technology (IT) can assist you in making decisions that will help your business’s model reach its full potential.
What is decision-making in business?
In the business world, decision-making is the process of examining and thinking over choices and steps that will help you reach a specific objective.
To keep it very simple, business decision-making plays out in the following way:
- Identifying an issue in your company, its products, or services.
- A research stage where you extensively analyse the problem, gather information, and brainstorm solutions.
- All possible scenarios are considered with the input of stakeholders and essential personnel.
- One of the plans is put into effect and is consistently monitored to determine its success.
Your business is a monument to every choice you have made. It determines the livelihoods of you and your employees – nothing can be left to chance, and everything needs to be carefully considered.
There are three types of decision-making models that your business can adhere to.
These are:
- The rational decision-making model – relies on data.
- The intuitive decision-making model – relies on instincts.
- Recognition primed decision-making – relies on past experiences to choose a satisfactory course of action in real time.
Whether your decisions are based on years of experience or other opinions, a day cannot go by in business where your choices do not affect present and future operations.
Benefits of using technology in business decision-making
The people who feel the effects of your decisions are your customers and employees. The morale of your staff and the customer experience are the deciding factors that prove if your decisions were well-met or misguided.
The right decision can give you peace of mind and shift your company’s trajectory in a profit-increasing direction. The wrong decision can do the opposite.
You and your staff have worked too hard to stumble over obstacles. There is a range of benefits to using business technologies in your decision-making process. These include:
Seamless data collection
There are many ways customers interact with businesses today. Whether they are filling out a survey on your website or they are engaging with you on social media, technology can be used to streamline your company’s data collection processes. This information can be stored in databases (on-premises or in the cloud) and is accessible at any time by you or your employees.
Data is fundamental to business – it can serve as insights into customers’ minds. Unreliable data can cost businesses 20%-35% of their operating revenue. However, with the latest technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and automation software, your company can gather up-to-date information on your customers and employees, and use that data as a foundation to help shape any business-changing decisions.
Powerful analytics
As businesses grow and collect more data, they can use technology to help make more informed decisions based on analysis and insights. This can lead to better choices, reduced risk, and lower costs. For example, imagine your business has experienced unprecedented growth in the past few years, but you do not understand why. Interrogating every customer who answers your phone calls is inefficient and a waste of time.
Instead, you can choose to leverage analytics programs to collate all customer information and identify any trends in your business’s services and customer interactions.
Those patterns can draw your attention to where your business is succeeding and can help you think about ways to capitalise on that. It could even be used to make predictions on the future of your market, giving you opportunities to make pre-emptive, career-defining investments.
Open communication
While it can often feel like you have to carry the weight of your business on your shoulders, your employees are your support team. Their interactions with clients and customers may be in a different capacity to yours. This can be an asset to you, as your staff may be filled with fresh ideas and critical perspectives that you must not overlook.
However, keeping everyone connected can be challenging. Collaboration and project management tools such as Microsoft 365 ensure that you and your employees can still communicate with each other, regardless of time and distance.
Whether you need to appoint your team as the main decision-makers on a project via a video call or you need to email a questionnaire to multiple departments, technology can help foster a culture of openness, loyalty, and transparency for your business.
Your business is meant for greatness and every decision you make will inch you one step closer to achieving it. However, your choices need to be well-informed and strategic. The best way to ensure those qualities is to adopt customer and employee-focused technologies that will provide you with the insights needed to better support your staff and clients.
Contact the business IT support specialists at Muscatech to see what technologies are available for you to bring your business to the next level.
