Are your current business systems not communicating with other as you intended and putting a serious dent in your productivity? With information flowing on disparate systems, for all you know, your business could be double-handling work and wasting time on mundane tasks which can be automated.

Integrating your tech stack brings together all the tools you use to digitally transform your business (What is Digital Transformation?), To make your life easier and give your customers a better experience.

In this blog, we give you the lowdown on what a tech stack is, why integrating it is critical to your business, and a few best practices to maintain your current systems.

What is a Tech Stack?

A tech stack is a collection of all the technology a business uses, whether it’s to carry out regular day-to-day activities or to tackle big projects. Anything from a CRM to a marketing automation tool, or even a team communication platform, are all part of the technology stack you use to streamline your operations.

But it’s also about getting the right technology for your business, and with 45% of executives thinking their business has not the right technology to implement a digital transformation, it can potentially do more harm than good to your productivity. The key to improving the effectiveness of all your tools and enhancing your productivity is to have a fully integrated tech stack with systems that talk to each other.

Here’s a look at how an integrated tech stack helps your business:

• • • • Gathers good quality data
      • Reduces user and data error
      • Manages your contacts, customers, and employees
      • Reduces human labour costs and increases business efficiency
      • Allows you to grow and scale your business at a rapid pace

5 Reasons why businesses need to integrate their tech stack

1. Enhance Your Business Communication & Info Sharing

At Hype & Dexter we use Slack for internal communication, and this is integrated with HubSpot to notify us of any deals we have closed on HubSpot, instead of having to check the platform for us to see. Not having to constantly check each system you use to know if something happened improves your efficiency and business flow.

2. Work From Home Efficiently

Working from home isn’t as easy as asking the person next to you in the office a question, and getting the answer immediately - it actually means there is less communication between people. With an integrated tech stack allowing you to process information at a better rate, it improves your process flow and communication between people and systems, enabling you to work from home efficiently.

3. Secure Your Confidential Information

An integrated tech stack removes the manual sending of information from one system to another, which reduces the amount of user handling and potential for discrepancies in disparate systems. For example, we use a tool called LastPass which securely stores our passwords for all our systems in a vault, so that we don’t have to remember it or have it saved elsewhere.

4. Boost Your Productivity

With an integrated cloud-based tech stack, real-time updates mean that people don’t have to be in the same room to work on a task. Thanks to software like LucidChart, and Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, multiple people can be working on the same document in real-time and changes are updated live, as and when they happen. Allowing multiple people to access documents and data at the same time improves the productivity of your team.

5. Reach New Customers & Improve Your Customer Experience

A fully integrated tech stack will enable you to break into new markets and understand your customers. With a pool of data to analyse, you can get a better understanding of your customer journey and determine the right moment to engage with them for a seamless customer experience. These insights will help you develop strategies to retain existing customers and learn how to engage with new ones to turn them into brand advocates.

Are your current business systems not talking with each other and hampering your team's productivity? Talk to us today and we can come up with a plan to integrate your business systems, and kick off your digital transformation journey!

To get a more in-depth understanding of why it’s so important for businesses to integrate their systems, we caught up with our Head of Data & Development, Sam Yap-Choong, to get his thoughts.

"There are two reasons why you need your tech stack to be integrated; the first being that you want things to be communicated across your systems in the same way, and the second is for that information to be as up-to-date as possible.”

Best practices for maintaining your integrated tech stack

Audit your current tech stack

Run a full audit on your current business technologies and make sure each of your systems are communicating with each other correctly. Conduct testing to check that integrations are working and communicating in a way that makes sense for the process and purpose.

Identify the purpose of each system & why you’re using it

Determine the purpose of each system you use and list out the functionalities to see the value it adds to your business. By doing this, you can remove systems with double-up features and save money to spend on other crucial areas of the business.

Determine the data for your business needs

Data, Data, Data! Think about the amount of data that flows from one system to another and ensure that it’s transferable. Having your data drawn from all your tools will streamline your reporting process, and remove the hassle of manually accessing each individual system.

Consider how your integrated tech stack will streamline your processes

Factor in how your technology improves employee and customer experience, and how it helps to streamline time-consuming tasks. Exploit every opportunity you can find to connect your technology, enhance your efficiency, and gather real-time data to optimise and scale your business.

Check how easily the new tool will integrate with your current systems

When looking for new tools to add to your business, you need to find a solution that integrates easily with your current systems. It’s important for this new tool to work well, and to not negatively impact your productivity.

To paint a clear picture of how integrating your systems can help your business, we asked Sam to share how our integrated tech stack has helped Hype & Dexter, and here’s what he had to say:

“It allowed us to be really productive by increasing our business efficiency, improving our processes and allowing people to work at an optimal level. It takes away the time that someone may need to copy information from one system to another – reducing the overall time it takes to complete a task."

Now that you know how integrating a tech stack has helped us, ask: is yours helping out your business like you thought it would?

If your business systems are not talking to each other in the way you want them to, you could potentially be throwing thousands of dollars down the drain.

We’ll work with you to understand your business, scope out your systems and come up with a solution to help you with your digital transformation. We have the expertise to handle anything from simple to complex system migrations, and integrate them to improve your business efficiency. So get in touch with us with a simple click of a button and start improving your business today!