The other day a friend of mine got an oil change and posted about it on Facebook. Unfortunately for the business, it looks like it won’t be returning. It wasn’t the service or any problem with his car that will keep him back. He noticed that the computers, the shop used to run business, was running on Windows 95. Upgrading can be a wise investment that pays off. This doesn’t just pertain to equipment, but upgrading your payment service can help your business make more money in the long run.
Tips To Upgrade Your Business
Take pride in your business! You wouldn’t show up at a big meeting in parachute pants and a wrinkled shirt. The same applies to those CRT monitors, with the green monochrome, or any other outdated equipment. It could make customers, competitors, or investors think twice before doing business with you.
Equipment
Is your business afraid to upgrade because it’s expensive? While your business may be the best at what it does, that doesn’t matter if your customers are willing to go to your competition if your business doesn’t. A recent survey by Microsoft discovered that over 90% of customers would take their business elsewhere if a business had outdated technology.
Upgrading your equipment is also a sound investment as it saves time. Replacing your company computers, with something that has a faster processor, will increase productivity. Not to mention, if your business runs the latest operating system of choice it will be more secure. As good as Windows XP was, Microsoft hasn’t supported it for years. That means no security updates or technical support. Thus your business will be quite vulnerable to malicious hackers.
Website
The way most customers are going to find your business is over the Internet. However, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile customers will move on. Customer will likely be searching for your business using their smartphones, or tablets. If they have to pinch and zoom or pull out a magnifying glass to find out what you have to say, they’ll think it’s not worth their time. Not to mention, Google is quite aware that most people will be searching on mobile. Therefore they will reward websites that are optimized, for it, with a higher ranking.
Logo
Sometimes the logo you designed for your company is in need of an upgrade. When your organization comes together to design a logo, they need to keep in mind that this is the first thing that potential customers will see. Bad logos can cause problems when displayed on websites may not look good on that business card. Are you offering new products? That was the reason Starbucks changed their logo. They no longer wanted just to be associated with coffee as they offered food and other beverages.
Building a real identity system around a design that your team can get behind not only provides value but can help to define the attitude of your business. Research and analysis are also important when taking changes into consideration. FedEx recently announced that they were changing all logos designs to a purple and orange color scheme. According to Patrick Fitzgerald, Senior VP of Integrated Marketing research showed that consumers best associated the two colors with their brand.
Customer Payments
Security isn’t just limited the computers running your business, but how you accept payments could also use an upgrade. Does your company mostly rely on payments by check? While a rather traditional form of payment, checks were never exactly the most reliable. For starters, a paper check is literally a piece of paper that contains the account holder’s information, including name, address, and often phone and driver’s license numbers. That’s not even remotely secure.
Another big disadvantage of accepting checks for business payments is the risk of having them bounce. This is costly, not only because of incurred bank fees, but your business risks bouncing checks. Can your business afford to suffer these losses?
Instead, offer your payment service. This allows customers a way to make a payment using Compass Pay. Our IVR phone payment solution makes sure that customer payments are safe and get verified in minutes. We built our phone payment solution with data security in mind.
Simple Upgrades With Major Results
IVR Technology Group does everything from pay by phone applications, to hosted contact centers, to well… anything. If you are looking to enhance your customer experience, we can help!