If you’ve only recently taken your first steps into running your own business, you are probably already familiar with the feeling of uncertainty that comes with start-up life. It takes courage to launch a start-up and steer it to sustained success, especially given the eye-opening statistics about the supposedly high failure rate of start-ups.
According to one statistic mentioned in a Medium article, more than half of start-ups fail to get past their fifth anniversary. Whether your own start-up sinks or swims this year could depend on how eagerly it follows these modern trends in digital communication…
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Being accessible to consumers across various channels
According to research highlighted by ZDNet, 73% of shoppers use multiple channels during their shopping journey, while 86% of consumers want to be able to shift between channels when talking to a brand.
The support channel that delivers the highest customer satisfaction is live chat, with 92% of customers expressing their satisfaction with using services in this bracket. The takeaway is clear: you need to make a staff of your business easy for customers to reach across various communication channels.
Being able to work remotely
We’ve naturally seen the work-from-home trend become mainstream in the wake of the pandemic’s arrival, with about 88% of companies asking their employees to start working from home in 2020, as UC Today relays. This situation has led unified communications technology to take center stage.
A unified communications system like one from telecoms giant Gamma can give your customers those multiple channels they seek and further help your staff to work productively outside the traditional office.
Compostable enterprise
As business requirements have become increasingly specialised, many organisations have needed increasingly specialised applications to suit.
All the same, however, thanks to “compostable enterprise”, these organizations don’t have to keep building new digital capabilities from scratch. Instead, they can use APIs to forge these capabilities from applications already at the workforce’s disposal.
API security
You might not have realised, as someone running a relatively young business, that the average enterprise has 900 applications. However, you should heed the warning that, as new endpoints proliferate, security holes can result. Therefore, you should aim to patch such holes in your own corporate applications.
Doing this at an early stage could help you to foster strong loyalty in customers, as research suggests that 84% of customers are more loyal to businesses with strong security controls. Meanwhile, research elsewhere hints that about 43% of data breaches last year resulted from a web application vulnerability.
Data analytics
Just over half of surveyed executives have expressed their belief that having an enterprise data analytics effort that is both well-developed and well-designed facilitates a superior customer experience.
Meanwhile, 48% of organizations recently indicated that they expected their revenue to take a hit if they didn’t complete digital transformation initiatives in the upcoming 12 months. Data analytics have been used to help companies discern customer perception and sentiment. The research firm Gartner says poor data quality is responsible for companies annually losing $15 million on average.
