In today’s digital landscape, customers expect you to deliver products and services in a fast and efficient manner. Heavyweights like Amazon and Google have set a bar in terms of operations, and they’ve set it high.
Although reinventing business processes can seem like a daunting task, www.dataconomy.com says it is possible to break digitisation down into four tangible (and data-driven) steps.
Rely on real-time business intelligence
Creating periodical reports is labour-intensive, requiring data gathering, standardising and processing information in spreadsheets. And once the report is out, the data becomes less and less relevant with each passing day.
A better approach is to use real-time business intelligence systems. By approaching BI in real-time management can direct the company towards its objectives by always having the relevant KPIs to hand. This approach ensures your business adopts a data-driven approach to operations as all projects will need to show measurable results.
To make this possible, you’ll need a robust way to gather data in real-time, data will need to be stored in a structured database, you’ll need equally as robust models, as well as a system of dashboards to display the results. Sounds complicated, right? Lucky for you, there are several great products out there like Microsoft’s PowerBI, Tableau, Looker and Sisense, which turn abstract data into easy-to-understand visual displays.
Adopt a CRM
A Customer Relationship Management system manages interactions between businesses and existing or potential clients. CRMs prevent a workplace from descending into chaos. They are a one-stop shop to house all your client information.
A CRM system is a great place to begin digitising. For your customer service team, a CRM can help automate many communications processes. It can help your sales team manage their pipeline and allow your marketing team to execute and measure campaigns. By providing management with an idea of the cash flow the sales team is expected to generate, it can also act as a small Enterprise Resource Planning system. Finally, a CRM will inform the operations departments of future production demands and inventory requirements.
There are a range of CRM systems out there depending on your needs. On one end of the scale, you have easy-to-use management tools such as Hubspot or Pipedrive, affordable systems such as Zoho CRM or SugarCRM, and sophisticated full-service suites offered by Oracle, SAP and Salesforce. But choose wisely. Once you pick a CRM, it is difficult to migrate to a different software in the future. Consider scalability, and if in doubt, seek out the advice of a CRM consultant.
Manage your knowledge and data
Invest in a Knowledge Management System for your business which can centralise your collective knowledge. It will make it easy to on-board new team members, share experiences across teams and departments, inform product developments or iterations and, in general, help to solve future problems.
There are many great Wiki systems available to you, from open source projects to more sophisticated programs like Salesforce Knowledge or Atlassian’s Confluence. If you integrate your KMS with team collaboration tools, some good examples here are Slack or Atlassian, you will encourage adoption and ideally seamlessly launch your KMS.
Listen to your customers
It’s clear that revenue depends on catering to the wants and needs of your customers. Structured client feedback can help to improve your procedures, products and services to better address the pain points of your clients.
The Net Promoter Score system is a great method to gather and eventually receive customer feedback. It’s a system based on the likelihood of a client or partner referring your business to a friend or colleague.
There are, of course, some challenges here when it comes to implementation. It will require management commitment, and a few technical resources to get it up and running. You’ll also need to give it ongoing attention to ensure you can use the feedback in an actionable way.
Digitising your business needn’t be as daunting as it sounds. By making a few changes along with a little investment, you could transform your operations.
#Takeaway
BitTorrent
BitTorrent is not a program. It is a method of downloading files using a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing system.
According to www.lifehacker.com, the programs that you use to download files via the BitTorrent protocol are called BitTorrent clients.
BitTorrent is not like Limewire/Kazaa/Napster/other P2P programs you have used in the past. This is often the biggest source of confusion for people new to BitTorrent. It is not difficult to use; it’s just different. As soon as you forget about your old file-sharing program (and you will once you start using BT), the easier it will be to start using BitTorrent.
What makes the BitTorrent protocol unique is that it distributes the sharing of files across all users who have downloaded or are in the process of downloading a file.
Because BitTorrent breaks up and distributes files in hundreds of small chunks, you don’t even need to have downloaded the whole file before you start sharing. As soon as you have even a piece of the file, you can start sharing that piece with other users. That’s what makes BitTorrent so fast; your BitTorrent client starts sharing as soon as it downloads one chunk of the file (instead of waiting until the entire download has been completed).
In order to download a file like the educational public domain video we mentioned above, you have to find and download a torrent file (which uses the .torrent file extension) and then open it with your BitTorrent client. The torrent file does not contain your files.
Instead, it contains information that tells your BitTorrent client where it can find peers who are also sharing and downloading the file.
