The key is to optimise your spending, making smart investments that support your business both in the here and now and into the future. Read on to learn more about how to strategise and achieve this.
Optimal Investment, Not Minimal Investment
It's important to remember that you are looking to optimise spending, not necessarily minimise spending. In other words, you need to lower IT costs without reducing the quality of the service you provide to customers. The dollars you invest in your equipment and infrastructure need to be actively making you money in return, so you need to spend wisely.
To achieve this, start by identifying your key operational needs. Hold discussions and interviews between management and personnel in different areas of your company. Examine support tickets and analyse customer satisfaction data. Take a look at other datasets such as server performance and usage levels across your IT infrastructure. Collating this quantitative and qualitative data together will give you an indication of where your IT infrastructure can be improved.
Unsure how to do any of that? Consider hiring a professional, after all handing off the task will mean you have a professional looking at everything, while you keep focusing on the future of your business.
With a greater understanding of your needs, you can make informed decisions on your investments. You will be able to purchase hardware and software systems that meet the specific needs of your organisation.
Realistic Planning for Scaling
Your business is designed to grow, but this idea of "growth" is too imprecise. As you optimise your IT spending, you will need to gain a more accurate picture of where your business is heading. Historical data will help you to understand this — how has your revenue grown in recent years, how many new customers and clients have you acquired, how has your IT infrastructure and team grown in this time? Cross-referencing this data with your current operational strategy will help you predict growth over the coming years.
Next, consider operational capacity. How much capacity do you have in reserve, and how many more clients can you serve with your existing teams and infrastructure? Scaling effectively means expanding your operational capacity to meet the growing needs of your business. Examining your current growth trajectory and understanding the limits of your capacity will help you to develop a realistic strategy for scaling, which you can then use to inform your investment in IT infrastructure.
Deploying Automated In-House Tools
There are other ways you can expand the capacity of your teams and optimise your IT spending. One way is to harness the advantages of automation. Many of the tasks your teams are handling manually can now be automated, reducing the workload for your personnel.
For example, data entry tasks tend to be time-consuming for human teams, and the tedium of the process leads to increased instances of human error. An automated system can complete this kind of task quickly and easily, eliminating the mistakes that come from manual inputs. Investing in automated IT infrastructure can help your business save money while also freeing up considerable working hours that can be focused on other operational aspects.
Supporting Human Interaction with AI
Automation can go beyond your in-house teams and be extended to your customers and clients too. While clients will still value the support from your human personnel, this will not always be necessary. For lower-level queries — or for troubleshooting common problems — artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools can be highly effective.
Investing in chatbot technology is a great way to optimise your IT spend. Modern chatbots are highly advanced and can utilise AI and ML to recognise customer intentions while also using natural language processing (NLP) to converse with clients. You may find that a significant proportion of your client service requests can be handled in this way, freeing up personnel and resources to provide close support for customers who really need it.
Make the Smart Investments
Reach out to our team to discover more about our we can help finance you IT infrastructure expansion, and how you can get more for your money today.
