By Adrienne Palmer, Founder, Insite Interactive
As the Founder of Insite Interactive, one of Dallas’ leading interactive agencies, I often find business leaders underestimating the power of technology to change the game in their businesses. When I founded Insite 20 years ago, the web was just emerging as a communication tool. And while everything about how we use technology has evolved over the years, the core premise for starting Insite remains: Help businesses leverage the latest technologies to make things better, easier and more efficient.
In the world of web technology over the last two decades, we’ve gone from simple brochure-like websites to complex applications that automate… well, just about everything. We’ve gone from desktops to tablets to mobile devices for connecting, transacting and communicating. We’ve gone from web and mobile interfaces being marketing tools to being fundamental platforms for business operations.
No other transformation in how we engage and conduct business has occurred at such an accelerated rate. It isn’t surprising that many leaders are challenged in keeping up, and most businesses aren’t fully optimizing the potential ROI these technologies make possible.
Like many Founders and CEOs, most of my time over the years has been spent educating and exploring possibilities. Below are just a few of the questions I try to instill when talking to businesses about their current and future plans for their web and mobile technologies:
- Is there information or data that would empower your internal or external teams to be more effective by being accessible anytime, from any location?
- Does your company portray an external face of transparency and service orientation through self-service access to the information that is important to your customers? Should it?
- Are your employees spending unnecessary time on documentation, transcribing information from one source to another, manual data churning to gain insights from historical information?
- How do your customers want to engage with you? Where will they be? What will they be doing/thinking? What will be their state of mind? How can you make it easy on them, intuitive and seamless, to interact with your company?
- Are you prepared to scale your operations by 10x or 100x through having automated systems, data collection and reporting that is built to scale with you?
Of course, every business is unique. Getting the right smart people in the room, and having open and collaborative discussions, can unveil opportunities. Implementing a powerful and effective web and mobile presence often requires collaboration of many departments and perspectives including marketing, operations, IT/IS, customer service, human resources, sales, or others. But in the end, the investment of time and resources pays exponentially and sets your business on a path to growth and success!