When companies are looking for ways to lower costs, some of the first things considered are usually reducing travel, cutting back on employee perks, or reducing office supply waste.

But cutting costs doesn’t have to mean doing without something. If it’s done right, it can actually make your business run better and fuel your growth.

Companies that look to IT innovations as a way to lower costs may find that productivity and business continuity benefit, while they also save significantly over older systems they may have been using.

For example: By making a technology upgrade from paper to electronic forms for citizen interactions, the Illinois Department of Human Services saved $6 million in administrative costs. (Adobe)

Tech Strategies that Save You Money

GEEK911 offers multiple computer services for Silicon Valley, CA companies and one of our specialties is saving our clients money. If there’s a workflow efficiency or compliance issue we can improve upon while also reducing your costs, you’ll bet we’ll find it!

It’s a common misconception to think that because you’re upgrading technology, that automatically means it’s going to add more to your monthly expenses. Often you can end up saving quite a bit just by choosing the right type of tech upgrades.

GEEK911’s Top Cost Saving IT Strategies

Here are some of our favorite ways to save costs while improving productivity and workflow at the same time.

Cloud Storage

If you haven’t yet made the switch from paper files to cloud storage, you might not realize how much those old paper files are costing you and how much you could be saving.

On average, paper files cost:

• $20 in labor to file a document
• $120 in labor to find a misfiled document

And while staff spend 5 to 15% of time reading information, they can spend up to 50% looking for a document. With cloud storage, not only your cost for storing files is less, with keyword searches the time spent looking for documents is reduced considerably.

One of the cloud solutions that we offer is UniFS. It offers unlimited file storage with 70% less hardware and allows you to access and collaborate on your files from any location. In addition, UniFS:

• Scales to fit all files globally
• Requires no separate backup or DR solution
• Offers access from any location
• Supports any level of performance
• Allows customers to use any cloud they want
• Provides centralized, single pane of glass management

The types of savings organizations have realized from using GEEK911’s UniFS cloud storage platform include reducing file storage costs by 40-50% over a 3 year period.

VoIP Hosted PBX Phone Systems

VoIP phone systems have come a long way in the last decade or so. The call quality has improved dramatically and the technology offers companies more flexibility than landline-based phones.

Cost savings include hardware that is much less expensive and cheaper calling rates, especially on international calls. You also have several advantages such as:

• Doing away with phone cables
• The ability to move phones wherever you like
• In case of a local power outage, phone lines can be routed to another location
• Employees can work remotely using their same number
• You have full control over your call routing and handling options

Compliance Tools

Now that personal information like credit card numbers and health records are being transmitted and stored digitally, there are a host of compliance regulations that companies have to adhere to, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI).

Just a First Tier HIPAA violation can cost a company between $100 to $50,000 per incident, so compliance technology has become more important than ever.

Tools like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure provide a cloud computing platform with security and data compliance built in. This technology safeguards customer data and provides support for companies tasked with data privacy compliance.

Help Desk Applications

Is your business missing potential sales because you’re handling customer inquiries through multiple channels that don’t connect? Leads come in several ways, but if you don’t have a central location to keep up with them all, you might miss a sales opportunity, plus staff time trying to cross reference a call with a contact form adds up fast.

Help desk applications like Amazon Connect (through Amazon AWS) is a cloud-based customer service center that makes it easy to coordinate all your customer support activities and quickly pull up the last conversation a customer had with your team. You can even connect it to a CRM program to funnel leads to your sales team automatically.

Companies that improve the customer experience and are there to answer a critical question at the right time can significantly increase revenues.

Travel Less, Video Conference More

Imagine being able to train 25 installers in 10 different cities to properly install your widget without needing to step foot in an airport. Just think of the savings on hotels and airfare!

Video conference technologies like Skype for Business and Zoom, make it possible for meaningful video meetings, trainings, and presentations where you don’t lose that face-to-face interaction, but can dramatically cut down on travel costs and the wear and tear of being on the road.

By rethinking some of the ways you interact with clients and your own team, you can reduce costs. It can also make it easier to meet sooner with an important client that’s across the country. You can also use online meetings as a way to connect your team and keep them engaged.

Looking to Cut Costs with the Right Technology?

At GEEK911 we are experts on analyzing your small business and coming up with a plan to cut your costs while revving up your technology!

Contact us for a free consultation today at 1-866-433-5411 and start saving!