Contactless Technologies to Accelerate Small Business Recovery


Business is always a challenge. After all, you need to manage sales, marketing, HR, and everything else all while dealing with changes in your market.

Of course, COVID-19 has made this much more difficult. The forced isolation has had a devastating effect on the global economy.

This is especially true for small businesses, which don’t have the giant budgets that public corporations do.

Furthermore, the solutions to turn around these economic downsides need to be contactless in order to stay compliant and do business even if you can’t have in-person foot traffic.

Therefore, in this article we will discuss how small enterprises can use contactless technologies to accelerate business recovery.

The end results will be wider reach, more efficient processes, and increased revenue to get your business on the right track again.

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

Contactless Payments

One of the major technological shifts accelerated by COVID-19 is the need to accept payments in a way that avoids in-person contact.

With traditional cash and even credit card machines, there is still a lot of back-and-forth handling that creates a safety issue.

Instead, your company can invest in contactless payments.

For instance, your point of sale can allow a card to be tapped quickly and easily by customers.

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If a sanitizer bottle is placed next to the point of sale, you can minimize the risk even further.

This solution is much preferred by customers who are in the vulnerable portion of the population.

Think of it this way, if at-risk customers have the opportunity to choose between a store with contactless payments versus a store without them, they will go with the former option.

You don’t want to lose business because you have no contactless card payments set up.

These contactless solutions can even be linked to smartphones. That way, all someone needs is a phone to do business with your company.

Of course, if at all possible, allow people to pre-order or pay online so that you reduce even more contact.

And remember, at the end of the day you don’t want anything to prevent customers from buying.

On-Demand Content

What happens if a large part of your business model is predicated on in-person selling?

This is the case for many businesses—and yet, the pandemic has made it much more difficult to perform these sales processes in a way that reassures customers of their safety.

The solution is contactless technology in the form of digital presentations.

Essentially, you can take your current business operations and find ways to automate them in a way that creates in-demand content.

Of course, this doesn’t just include sales presentations.

There are other types of content that you can create:

  • Blog posts and articles
  • Explainer videos
  • Product walkthroughs
  • Testimonials and expert opinions

By providing customers with on-demand content, they can interact with your brand in a contactless way.

It also means that you are creating digital assets, which is another major benefit.

These assets will work for your 24/7 and help you scale in order to encourage revenue recovery going forward.

Visual AI Technology

Artificial Technology (AI) has been applied across various industries in recent years.

It has the ability to help with automation, scalability, and, of course, contactless business operations.


Using AI should be a priority of every company looking for ways to achieve lasting recovery during these difficult financial times.

For instance, if you have a home improvement company, there may be certain times you need to perform an inspection.

AI video and cameras can now scan environments rapidly.

They can analyze patterns through repeated machine learning and then provide evaluations to your team.

Using AI will not only save time, but also allow you to accept more business instead of turning it down by performing contactless services.

Business Apps

If possible, each business should have its own app. It can be hugely valuable by offering the newest technology to your company to engage with your customers.

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An app can be a combination of all the other contactless technologies above. That is one of many benefits of mobile apps for modern companies.

Use your own company app to deal with the following:

  • Payments
  • Ordering
  • Scheduling Appointments
  • Calls
  • Promotions


For instance, on the promotion side of things, your app can push certain discounts.

You can even use tracking within the app itself to see which users are going to be most open to purchasing a newly launched product.

By using a mobile app, you are leveraging a very important trend.

Many people engage with the world around them on their mobile phone instead of a computer or even a tablet these days.

People can interact with your business no matter where they are or what time of day it is.

That kind of access and visibility is priceless for companies.

Conclusion

Small to medium-sized businesses need every advantage that they can get. After all, the business landscape has changed greatly in the last few years.

There are many more competitors, which means that customers have more choices to choose from.

Additionally, the coronavirus pandemic has made consumers even more selective as many have seen their incomes dwindle.

That means that companies need a solid strategy to reach these customers in a smart, contactless way.

So review the contactless technologies above today.

Determine the ones that are most relevant to your business operations and get started so that you can begin to increase your revenues and gain momentum toward business recovery.

Joe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters