We spoke with TechQuarters, an IT support company UK businesses across the country work with to make their businesses more efficient. They have helped many organizations implement technologies that make their business more efficient. Internet of things is the latest technology that TechQuarters are beginning to recommend to their customers. They discussed with us some of the top benefits SMBs can get from IoT. Great for Hybrid Working As one of the many managed service providers UK businesses have worked with to develop their hybrid working solutions, TechQuarters see IoT tech as a powerful tool for hybrid work. The data produced by IoT networks provide excellent insights into business processes, and this can be used to manage hybrid working in the most efficient way. Let’s say you have smart hot desks in your office that give you information on their usage. Perhaps a trend is revealed that indicated users are consistently working from home more often than they are commuting into the office. This might help you make decisions about the future of your office – you may wish to downsize. Equally, productivity trends may be revealed to you by analyzing IoT data, which can help you make decisions that support your employees’ productivity. Better efficiency Another way Internet of Things technology can benefit SMBs is by automating repetitive and time-consuming jobs within the business. Tasks, both hardware related and software related, can be automated so that employees no longer need to oversee them; and the time saved by this can add up and actually result in much better productivity because users can get on with other tasks that they’d normally have to find the time for. More business opportunities Historically, making decisions about the direction of one’s business has always included a degree of guesswork, even if it is very small. The reality is that nobody can predict the future, but with IoT technology, you can get a little bit closer to doing just that. IoT devices produce an immense amount of data – sometimes it can be hard to interpret, but there are new tools and solutions being developed all the time which makes it easy to decode and analyze that data and gain useful insights from them. Let’s say a retail company has IoT technology embedded in their customer buying process. The data produced from this can give the company invaluable information on the trends of their customers, and when utilized for long enough, patterns will begin to emerge. The company can combine this information with other data, such as market trends, in order to essentially predict the future of their customer buying patterns. Better customer experiences IT support providers like TechQuarters often implement IoT devices to help monitor their customers’ IT infrastructures – it allows them to receive alerts when things go wrong; then they can contact their customers and get to work fixing the issue, and this way, the customer has minimal downtime, if any at all. This is just one of the ways IoT tech can help improve customer experiences in a single sector. In fact, IoT is being utilized in other sectors, such as Retail to provide more seamless customer experiences. In UK supermarkets like Sainsburys, IoT is enabling customers to scan and pay for products with their smartphones. In other retail sectors, like fashion and clothing, IoT is being utilized to provide a more high-tech customer experience, such as with smart fitting rooms.
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