How Your Business Can Choose the Right Technology

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How Your Business Can Choose the Right Technology

Steve Jobs had this to say about technology.

“You have to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. “(Asking) what incredible benefits can we give to the customer?”

Somewhere in your customer experience there are gaps that can be closed with the right technology.

To determine which will have the greatest impact on your business, look no further than earning the trust of leads, prospects, and customers.

Businesses nowadays are compelled to adopt technology solutions to keep up appearances, to be a recognized member of the club.

It may well be necessary to attract and keep top talent. Fortunately, it’s never been easier to fit new technology solutions into the budget.

The problem is technology can eat away at your most valuable resource – time. The test drive alone is often a significant commitment.

Before you know it your free trial runs out. Not long after that you stop using it, but of course, you keep paying because your intention is to eventually make it to work. Sound familiar? Don’t get guilted into trying every platform or piece of software that people rave about. Instead, listen to your customers. Here’s why.

Ask Where Technology Can Add Value For Customers

Most customers will never know what goes on behind the scenes to make those beautiful lawns and landscapes that give them so much enjoyment. The truth is most probably don’t care either.

What they do care about is what they experience, discovering, acquiring and enjoying those solutions. A segment of that overall experience is the sales process.

• Does your business have a written sales process?

• Does it consistently follow all of the steps?

• Does it share that process with its customers?

Many companies cannot answer yes to all three of these questions. As a result, they are ill-equipped to choose a CRM that fits their sales culture.

Align Technology with Your Customer Experience

Design fees proved to be a chronic obstacle with our landscape customers. So, we did exactly what Steve Jobs suggested, walking our process all the way back to our first point of contact.

We smoothed out our talking points to help people understand the value of our design process. Nowadays we can have that conversation in advance with websites, social media, and other content marketing tools. But here’s the thing. Your customer experience may not call for a fancy website.

And your business may choose to forego social media completely. The point is there is no perfect technology platform or tool. However, there are thousands technology solutions that when paired with your customer experience will move it closer to ideal, to perfection.

The key is to first design the ideal experience and compare it to your current reality.

• How should the buyer’s journey ideally start?

• What are buyers’ typical mindsets?

• What is the desired path that will best serve them?

• What might trip someone up?

• How can you remove those fears and obstacles?

You probably know where you are coming up short, but to be certain, talk to customers one-to-one to get their input.

Now you are ready to find what works.

Prioritize Decision Making Criteria Before Buying

Decision criteria are unique to each and every buyer. Develop a decision criteria template that will make short work of the evaluation process. Here’s my short list.

• Reasonable price and payment terms

• Free trial and onboarding

• Provider’s company culture aligns with ours

• Consistent user experience across devices

• Timely customer communication and support

16 FALL | 2018

Feature Story

by Jeff Korhan, Landscape Digital Institute

• Regular technology upgrades and training

• Integrates with related technology solutions

• Gets better with use

In my opinion, price is the easiest one to check off the list because thanks to cloud computing most technology today is rented, not owned. This allows for flexible pricing and pay as you go terms that are easy on the budget.

You should have a warm feeling about your technology provider because they will become a partner that must be committed to your success. As you know, technology breaks. This is why I’ll only work with a company I can reach and trust.

Another must-have is getting technology to do what it should with minimal effort. This means providing the right data when and where I need it, on whatever device I happen to be using.

To further illustrate my criteria, let’s unpack how I use a few tools and why each is part of my daily workflow.

Evernote – Consistent User Experience

As a marketer and customer experience strategist, the most valuable data in my world is information -- ideas, stories, and other customer data. Evernote captures them in the form of web clippings, photos, embedded links to documents, and of course, text notes.

Most important, the app synchronizes everything across all of my devices.

Evernote allows users to have hundreds of themed notebooks and thousands of tags to make everything easily discoverable. This is what makes it an invaluable tool.

After all, what good is information if you cannot find it when you need it?

Courtesy of Google

Here are just a few of the ways I use Evernote (*some available only available with the modestly priced premium version).

• Daily journaling to capture ideas

• Summarizing books read for later access

• Tracking client activity

• Drafts of articles, presentations, and books

• Conversation summaries

• Photo ideas, such as unique landscape solutions

• Forwarded emails automatically inserted into a notebook*

• Capturing countless articles from the web in one click

• Retrieving relatable quotes like the one above from Steve Jobs

G Suite – Integrates with related technology solutions

G Suite is Google’s suite of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools that includes Gmail and Google calendar, among others.

When you consider how productivity is driven by email and calendar appointments and reminders, G Suite is worth checking out. It started a decade ago as a service (then Google Apps) for using Gmail on your own domain. Today I have dozens email aliases using multiple domains and G- Suite manages it all for about $50/year.

Like Evernote, a huge benefit of G Suite is its searchability, frequent updates, and integration with other services, including most cloud-based CRM’s.

Spotify – Get’s better with use

I’m a heavy user of Spotify because I do a lot of writing in coffee shops and on airplanes and the right instrumental music becomes a stable background that keeps me focused. Some of my favorite artists are Marconi Union, Eluvium, and Max Richter.

The primary reason I’m loyal to Spotify is that it gets better with use, learning my music tastes and making informed recommendations. As machine learning and AI becomes more universal, the same will be true for all technology solutions.

Everyone wants to get better for their customers and the right technology makes that possible if you follow a predictably reliable path like the one outlined here.

Jeff Korhan is the author of Built-In Social and founder of Landscape Digital Institute. He helps green industry owners, marketers and sales teams craft and communicate branded customer experiences that sell. Learn more at www.landscapedigitalinstitute.com and contact him at jeff@landscapedigitalinstitute.com

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