Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are undeniably making a significant contribution to the GDP and overall economic growth all over the world, especially in India. The Smes in India have seen exponential growth over last five decades, proving to be highly dynamic and vibrant enabling large employment opportunities at lower cost as opposed to large industries. Some SMEs are even being affiliated to large industries as secondary units, thus widening the scope of the business connection. Not only employment, the SME sector also helps in industrialization of rural areas, increasing competitiveness in domestic and export markets and also substantial revenue generation.
The Mobile Technology, as an entity, holds value for being the socket that connects business with broader customer base. It has managed to come the closest to common people since mobile phones have become a part and parcel of human life in urban as well as rural areas, connecting individuals to the world virtually. Applications to facilitate business, entertainment, services, social networking and much more are available to the user in one device and hence it has become the most beneficial and viable means of connection for both the service provider and the receiver.
Off late, mobile technology is making its way into the SME market proving itself to be the key to reach a wider range of customers than usual and stay connected with them. Given that digitization in India is proceeding on a serious note, SMEs are largely adopting mobile technology as a fuel to keep up in the competitive run. This development can help rejuvenate SMEs in following ways.
1) Maintain a continual online presence
Online presence was once considered a luxury for SMEs as one could almost sense the cloud of doubt saying, “How will going online do any good to a small/medium enterprise?” always lurking around. As of today, it is evident that mobile friendly businesses are the sought-after ones when compared to offline business solutions. We cannot neglect the fact that the majority of Indian population is composed of youth and keeping up with trend is what is preferred by most rather than sticking with conventional ways. E-commerce is a remarkable example of sellers and buyers taking it to the online market, eliminating the restriction of physical distance. Preference to online business and on-the-go solutions is trending and most SMEs are complying to it by adopting mobile technology in order to maintain an online presence.
2) Stay connected to customers
Staying in touch with customers matters, especially when there is a lot of competition. There are a lot of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, for example, Google My Business, available to communicate to potential or active customers. Providing satisfactory service after client on-boarding plays a vital role in ensuring the loyalty of the customer to the product or the enterprise. It is important to look at a business from customer perspective in order to maintain the clients for long period. Collecting continuous feedbacks from customers and acting upon it will ensure that the enterprise is going on the right path. Mobile friendly businesses can get this done easily since their customers are connected to them all the time through the application or website and are free to provide feedbacks or register complaints whenever they choose to. For this to work in the firm’s favour, they should promptly respond to the feedbacks and genuinely look into it. Otherwise it would be more of a liability than asset. Apart from feedbacks and forums, good UI, personalization, offers and credit points are ways to keep the customers interested in the product/brand.
3) Be more operationally flexible
Mobile technologies, in most cases, take care of client management, provision of products and services, business tracking, digital record maintenance, and gaining insights to further development. Marketing automation and analytics is one such specialization in digital marketing where the marketer can get metrics about their current performance, tractions to their application or website, number of static or active customers and so on by building campaigns and then work on how to bring in more revenue to the firm. This can be done from the comfort of mobile phones thanks to the marketing automation software and applications such as Google Analytics.
4) Go digital without having to know rocket science
Businesses do not have to worry about not having technical knowledge to be a digitized one. There are numerous players available for building IT solutions for SMEs, who are mostly SMEs themselves. They focus on building simple-to-use and simple-to-understand products so that the product can cater to the needs of the firm at the same time not overwhelm them with complexity. Again, the cycle of customer service and satisfaction continues, that is, if and when there are difficulties with the software product, the vendor has to be available to solve it.
SMEs in various sectors of the economy are growing dynamically and the adoption of mobile technology only boosts them by giving them the ability to focus on the quality of their products as well as services pertaining to their customers simultaneously and efficiently. Thus there is potential of further growth and revenue generation for enterprises that opt for mobile technologies to enhance their businesses.
Thoughtbees is a product and technology services company that enables Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to accelerate innovation through the adoption of Mobile and Cloud-Native strategies. We provide expertise in cloud readiness and implement disruptive cloud solutions within the most widely utilized technology platforms available today.
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Performance of SMEs fuelled by Mobile Technology was originally published in Techsmart on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
