How Emerging Technology Drives Productivity

Technology in the workplace is the new normal. Thanks to greater integrations in our personal lives, employees and employers alike are acquainted with the many benefits technology offers and are looking to see these benefits translate into their work lives as well. Using the best tools and software on the market is not only beneficial for business leadership, but it can also contribute to a happier, more engaged workforce. This is because many new types of technology help streamline workflows, allowing employees to divert their attention at work to larger projects as opposed to getting lost in the tedium. Although most businesses recognize the value that technology can drive toward an organization, a staggering 60% of organizations have not yet developed a strategy for deploying tech usage in their workplace. To help your company design a strategy for implementing new technology, we’ve listed a few key areas of business operations, and how corresponding technology can have a substantial impact on productivity across your organization.

Strength in team dynamics

Whether you have three employees or 300, your company’s ability to establish strong connections amongst one another is paramount to success. This is because strong teamwork environments are known to boost engagement and reduce turnover — and according to Forbes, fostering team dynamics is the most valuable investment you can make.Thinking of team dynamics as an investment requires you to reconsider how you implement team strategies in the office. Instead of spending your resources on team lunches or happy hours, you can foster higher levels of engagement and ROI through investments in new technology that will create a fortified work front for your teams. Learning management software (LMS), for example, bridges the gap between your current employees and recent hires to boost interpersonal relationships within your department. These platforms offer a cohesive digital space to track the progress of your employees currently onboarding, which can help your new hires become proficient in their positions much more quickly. Because so much of learning a new job is centered around asking questions and associating with other people in your department, most LMS platforms offer designated spaces for mentorship programs and feedback from your teams, allowing new hires to understand the demands of their job through a more human connection.

Customer inquiry management

Great customer service demands both speed and precision, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to master. One study found that 90% of polled consumers rated an immediate response as important when they have a question for customer service teams. At the same time, 62% of consumers say that insights and knowledge are critical to their customer experience. How do you ensure timely responses that don’t lose that personal touch when so often prioritizing one means sacrificing the other? Technology designed to better manage customer inquiries can help your business preserve both quality and quantity.Take contact center software as one example. Designed to enhance customer experience by lowering wait times and directing calls to the correct department, contact center technology aids your support teams to help keep customers satisfied and engaged. Many call center solutions offer call volume management features, such as intelligent interaction routing, which can help managers visualize current queues and relay customers to agents they’ve spoken with previously. When paired with a knowledge center or CRM database, you can ensure that your teams have the background information they need to tailor conversations to each individual’s needs. This helps teams move through pending inquiries with both speed and accuracy.Many businesses have also optioned for an AI chatbot solution to maximize the time and productivity of their customer service teams. With the advent of eCommerce marketplaces and other online transaction systems, companies have discovered that their customers want to be in control of their own purchase journey – researching, buying, and problem-solving without ever contacting a company representative. Chatbots take the self-service journey one step further by enabling customers to ask questions whenever they want to make a purchase. And since these inquiries would otherwise need to be answered during office hours by one of your team members, chatbots guarantee that your customers receive instant answers to their questions around the clock.

The mobilized workforce

Over 3.7 million employees work remotely for at least half of their workweek. These numbers partly indicate an increasing demand to balance work and personal time for employees, but they are also indicative of the trend toward global operations. Even small businesses today work outside of their local communities – whether they’re selling their digital products to overseas clients or connecting with vendors on the other side of the state.With a greater number of employees working in their home offices, traveling for meetings or switching to coworking environments, mobile technology is one of the only ways to guarantee that your staff stay connected and at their maximum productivity levels. Making its way onto the mobile market, businesses are converting to 5G cellular technology for unparalleled speeds on mobile networks. Previous generations of cellular unlocked new capabilities for smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices (1G offered voice calls, 2G enabled SMS messaging, etc).When compared to 4G LTE, 5G hasn’t expanded into many new features for its users – still offering video streaming, web access, texting, voice and video calling – but this technology has instead prioritized speed, latency and quality of cellular signals.With speeds tracked at 10 gigabits per second, 5G technology will completely redefine the way that we do work. Employees will enjoy even greater connectivity between all of their devices, thanks to deeper integrations with Internet of Things (IoT) systems, which are capable of pairing everything from your company coffee machine to the laptop you work on every day. Although IoT and 5G won’t completely reinvent the devices you already use in your office, these emerging pieces of technology will make it possible for the tools you use daily to work in sync with one another much more smoothly, giving your teams the time and resources they need to handle bigger-picture concerns as opposed to getting stuck in their day-to-day operations.

Aubrey Galbraith is a business communications specialist. Her main areas of focus include business technology, company culture and the intersections between both. When she isn’t writing, you can find Aubrey reading the news or researching the latest trends affecting businesses everywhere.