Today’s startups are disrupting otherwise established business models across a number of industries. With their innovation changing the way to get things done, founders are challenging current processes and finding ways to win at the incumbents’ own game. Several technologies and methodologies are helping businesses, new and old alike, reinvent the wheel and optimize their businesses in the process. These involve automation, big data, cloud technologies and the like.
Big data and automation startups help improve existing businesses by adding value to an already profitable operation. Such platforms also help improve business operations for those seeking improved profitability. After all, cloud services are meant to be scalable, which means providers can target any business from small to large enterprise.
Automate Your Pricing
Pricing automation can ensure that e-commerce businesses present the most attractive offers, and can get the best profit out of transactions and customers. This can also apply to the omni-channel approach, which includes offline, online and mobile sales approaches.
Pricing automation tools allows a small business to capitalize on automatic pricing fluctuations, placing products and services on sale when customers are most likely to buy, and dynamically adjusting prices according to various factors like competitor data and consumers’ propensity to spend. As an entrepreneur, you know doubt know what a critical role pricing plays in the consumer’s buying decision. After all, 36% of online shoppers say they spend time finding the lowest price before making their purchase.
Streamline Your Business Processes
Big data and automation also allows enterprises to streamline business processes and IT department tasks. This can be particularly important in the context of enterprise resource planning (ERP) testing, optimization. ERP testing tools can speed up the process by automatically finding bugs, code errors, and potential pain points without the need for any tedious manual intervention.
By reducing the stress on the IT department, your business not only saves money, but frees the team up to work on other, more important projects, such as the launch of a new product or service.
Hear What Your Customers are Saying
One of the best ways you can improve your products and services for your customers is to listen to and pay attention to what it is they’re saying. It’d be impossible to constantly monitor every social channel alongside search engines to find mentions of your company. Using a tool like Synthesio for social media analytics allows you to see not only what your customers are saying about your brand, but what they’re saying about your competitors, too. Analyze the data to find out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you can do to improve
You can then engage with your social audience and scale social throughout your enterprise as needed. Social media is not only effective in reaching out in the consumer market, however. Entrepreneurs targeting other businesses can also engage other businesses through Oktopost, a B2B social media management platform that optimizes outreach campaigns with the best impact in mind.
Prospect for New Customers or Partners
Speaking of B2B markets, another killer startup that caters to B2B outreach is Unomy. The sales and marketing intelligence platform provides a browser-based data mining tool that lets small businesses find valuable business information on potential customers and clients, and even competitors. Coming in both browser plugin and web dashboard, the tool lets users find information from across 40,000 news sources, 80 million professionals and hundreds of thousands of companies globally.
Filters include geography, industry, funding and business type, among others. The up-and-coming company says doing prospecting research this way can save significant time and effort for sales and marketing personnel. The solution is similar to enterprise-grade platforms like Avention, but at a fraction of the necessary IT resource and price.
Build Customer Loyalty with a Rewards Program
With the help of big data and a service like Punchh, your business can foster growth with a customer loyalty rewards program. The platform works with modern POS Systems, and allows businesses, restaurants in particular, to engage their customers through mobile apps. In the end, the system uses big data to make sure your guests are getting the right offer, at the right place, and at the right time. The data from the app also ensures you can fine-tune your marketing campaigns, and even see their results in real-time.
Startups are causing disruption within their respective industries because they’re changing the way businesses have to operate to stay on the competitive edge. The key to staying relevant in your industry is embracing these technologies and learning how to leverage them to the best of your ability, even it means pivoting as the need arises. In the end, trying to make sense of all the big data at your disposal can be quite overwhelming, so knowing what specific challenges you’re working to solve can put you one step ahead of the rest of the crowd.