For tech’s sake
Tech and business have a weird relationship.
For every new invention, it seems everyone’s in a rush to make sure they don’t miss out on the potential savings or earnings. Or the opportunity to tell the world how they are disrupting and innovating.
The media doesn’t help: every business article proclaims the death of something that until last week had been The Way Things Are Done.
And because technology launches to market more regularly these days, it’s easy to get stuck in a constant cycle of updating everything. It feels like you have to keep chasing digital nirvana or your business will crumble.
All of which takes up business focus, and by extension, decreases momentum.
Sometimes tech is just a distraction
It all feels very important though. Like it’s stuff you should be doing. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it really will give you a competitive advantage that cements your position at the forefront of your field and increases market share.
But often it’s easy to forget that you’re allowed to ask a question, like “What does blockchain really mean for my coffee shop,” and arrive at the answer of “Not much.”
I believe we often use these cutting edge quests as a way of overlooking the more boring, but arguably more useful, things we could be doing to drive our companies forward.
Things like, maybe making sure when our customer or client uses a product they get a result that is at least close to the claims we make in the marketing materials. Or that if they do have an issue or question, someone answers the phone when it rings. Or that they can even find the phone number. Or that the website even works on a phone.
That’s not to say it’s not worth investigating emerging tech – just put it through a sanity check that pits whatever it is against the ‘boring’ stuff in the business: service delivery, new business, invoicing, payroll etc. If it wins, go nuts! But if you’re investing in AI-driven business development when you’re still manually generating invoices, I’d argue your time might be better spent fixing the invoicing.
A relatively low-stress business tech improvement I do recommend is using Facebook Messenger on your website so clients can access you easily with simple questions. 2 years ago you would have been paying good money to access that technology. Now? Free. You’re meeting your customers where they are, using a tool they are probably already very familiar with, and it costs neither of you a cent. Win/win.
If you’re feeling guilty, I’ll be honest and say Wyatt Media is certainly not perfect here either: we spend time and money on keeping up to date on the latest in search engine optimisation or web site design, when we should probably be putting it towards making sure our own website clearly says what we do and offers useful information. (All of which we are working on at the moment.)
In fact, writing this article already prompted me to update our site to support live chat.
What are the things your time could be better spent focusing on than the next big thing in technology?
The prompt for this article was a recent LinkedIn post by Tom Goodwin. If you’re interested in marketing, consumer behaviour and technology, Tom is a voice of relative reason.
PS. If you think chat on your website sounds great, you can find the official Facebook chat tool for your business here. If you want any help installing it on your site, or making your site a bit more modern, click the chat button at the bottom right of this page 🙂