Organizations that want to take advantage of upcoming social, economic, and technological transformations must do more than simply create great products. To ensure your enterprise goes from strength to strength while making the most of potential disruptions, you’ll need to future-proof your business.
Read this guide to better understand what future-proofing your business means and find out 7 actionable strategies that you can use to ensure your organization is ready for tomorrow’s world.
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What Is Future-Proofing?
Simply put, future-proofing is the process of anticipating future events and developing plans to minimize the fallout from unforeseen circumstances while taking advantage of opportunities.
This type of strategic planning looks at ways to ensure that a business prospers in the long term. It considers the company’s strengths and weaknesses, while ensuring that the entity is able to overcome potential threats and take advantage of future opportunities.
Future-proofing is imperative for ensuring that your organization is prepared for a variety of unforeseen events, like technological developments or economic shifts. This is especially important when you’re running a business during times of constant change.
8 Ways to Future-Proof Your Business
1. Perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis
When you’re tackling a complex problem like future-proofing, it’s sometimes best to go back to basics. Performing a SWOT analysis to understand your enterprise’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a great place to start.
This helpful tool can help you to figure out what your company is doing well right now, where it can improve, and how you can prepare for the future.
It’s likely that you’ve carried out a SWOT analysis at some stage during your business journey, but it’s helpful to revisit these evaluations every once in a while. The constantly changing business landscape means that new challenges and opportunities arise all the time and you want to ensure that your organization is equipped to take advantage of them.
2. Consider Your Customers
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. To ensure that your operation is able to grow, you need to understand what your customers need and want now, as well as how that might change in the future.
Implementing a tracking system to monitor customer behavior will give you better insight into how your buyers interact with your brand. It can also help you to identify shifts in how they shop or the products or services they’re buying. This information is extremely useful when it comes to predicting how these metrics might change in the future.
With Pay.com’s full-service payment infrastructure, you can use your Pay Dashboard to gain valuable insights into your customers’ behavior. The in-depth reports and analytics put all the information you need to make faster, more informed business decisions at your fingertips.
3. Keep On Top of Tech
Identifying and harnessing technologies that may improve your employees’ and customers’ experiences goes a long way to ensuring your enterprise is future ready.
Take a look at your operations and figure out where you can introduce automations. Using solutions that take care of routine tasks will free up employees’ time and enable them to focus on more impactful strategic tasks that move you towards your greater business goals.
For your customers, you’ll want to focus on deploying programs that create frictionless shopping and checkout experiences. For example, giving your customers a range of payment methods to choose from makes checkout easy and reduces cart abandonment.
Pay.com makes it easy for you to accept multiple payment methods online. Whether your customers prefer to pay using credit and debit cards, mobile wallets, ACH transfers, or other alternative payment methods, you can add these options to your checkout page in just a few clicks.
4. Diversify Your Business’s Offerings
When you were first starting out in business, you may have been given the following advice: Do one thing and do it well.
While it is wise to choose a niche and develop products or services that delight your target audience, diversification can often mean the difference between success and failure when change sweeps through an industry.
That said, you don’t want to go too broad. Monitor consumer behavior trends and identify opportunities that are relevant to – and can potentially augment – your existing operations. For example, Amazon created Amazon Logistics to ship packages and freight to decrease costs, reduce their reliance on third-party providers, and speed up delivery times.
5. Go with a Growth Mindset
As much as you can strategize and project, the future is unfortunately uncertain and even the best laid plans can go awry. In these instances, it’s your ability to respond to the unforeseen circumstances that makes all the difference.
Having a growth mindset – and imbuing this into your business culture – ensures that you’re able to use challenges to develop. Viewing novel problems as an opportunity to learn is a great way to ensure that you and your organization are able to evolve.
A commitment to continuous learning will ensure that your business is able to tackle and take advantage of unpredictable difficulties to ensure your business thrives.
6. Structure for Sustainability
Like agility, sustainability should be a golden thread that runs through all of your business practices.
Enhancing sustainability status can be challenging for a going concern. Again, it’s important to establish an overall sustainability vision, identify long-term objectives, and break these down into more manageable goals.
Your plan should balance people, profit, and the planet. Actions like creating an inclusive business culture, attracting new investments, and minimizing carbon emissions are a few examples of items that can be included in your sustainability strategy.
7. Protect Your Business from Payment Fraud
Ecommerce sales drive billions of dollars in payments every day. With all of that money flying around, it should come as no surprise that online sellers are a favorite target for cybercriminals.
Fortunately, there are a variety of tactics you can use to detect and prevent ecommerce fraud and keep your customers’ data safe during transactions while minimizing the cost to your business.
Pay.com maintains Level 1 PCI DSS compliance, tokenizing every transaction to prevent interception by cybercriminals. Plus, our smart checkout identifies suspicious transactions and thwarts fraud using 3D Secure 2.0 (3DS2) authentication.
The Benefits of Working With Pay.com as Your Payment Service Provider
Pay.com provides a flexible payment infrastructure that can help you to future-proof your enterprise. With our solutions, you can easily track your buyers’ behavior to ensure you’re able to meet their present and projected needs.
In addition to in-depth reporting and analytics that can help you to make informed business decisions, Pay.com can help to get your organization future ready with:
- Multiple payment methods: Accept payments from customers all over the world via their favorite channels, including credit and debit cards, mobile wallets, or other alternative payment methods.
- Enhanced transaction security: Credit and debit card details are tokenized in transit, in compliance with PCI DSS standards, while 3DS2 reduces the risk of fraudulent transactions.
- Transparent pricing: Our flat-fee, per-transaction pricing model ensures that you know exactly what you’ll pay at the end of each month, so you can future-proof your business finances.
Click here to get started with Pay.com now!
The Bottom Line: The Future Looks Bright With A Plan
Business longevity ultimately comes down to planning for the future. With the rate of social, economic, and technological change we’re seeing today, it’s near to impossible to predict exactly where we’ll find ourselves in the next five, 10, or 20 years.
To stay relevant, your organization needs to adapt and evolve as various shifts take place. Assessing your business’s strengths and potential opportunities for diversification is a great starting point for future-proofing your enterprise.
Choosing systems that are able not only to meet your organization’s current needs, but also have the ability to be adapted as technological developments happen is another essential.
Pay.com offers full-service payment infrastructure with expansive capabilities that can be adapted to suit your business. Our Pay Dashboard has powerful analytics and allows you to easily add your customers’ favorite payment methods to your checkout page.
Get started with Pay.com today!
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