Credit Managers Can Navigate Digital "Silver Bullet" - CPA

Credit Managers Can Navigate Digital “Silver Bullet”

27th February 2018.

In a recent article written for the Daily Telegraph, Michelle Ovens insists that being digitally enabled should be as “easy as breathing” for small and big businesses across the UK.

As Michelle Ovens claims, Digital is the “silver bullet” that enables everything else. Creating a company website, updating social media, or boasting a professional email account, opens your business to a world of new opportunities. Marketing campaigns will give your sales team a boost, while the exhaustive recruitment process will be eased through utilising social media portals such as Linkedin. Unfortunately, there still remains a large portion of small businesses who refuse to embrace the ‘digital bullet’. Either due to concerns about expense, lack of understanding or lack of confidence, a significant amount of business owners are sticking to their guns.

Credit managers cannot help with your understanding- we are not multimedia experts ourselves- but we can certainly ease the expense and hopefully give your confidence a boost in the process. At the Credit Protection Association, we aid the cash flow of many of our small business members. We chase down late payers and unpaid invoices and open our members up to new opportunities and new ventures. Many of them have gone on to buy new computers, as well as hire advisers to teach their staff how to operate them.

One of the major advantages of a digital workplace is productivity. Manual processes are traditional and familiar, but they can also slow your whole team down. Embracing direct debit payments rather than cheques, or writing emails rather than letters, can significantly heighten the productivity of your whole workplace, and make your customers happier too.

According to a survey from HSBC, 7 percent of small firms plan to make productivity a priority. Yet research from the 2017 Lloyds UK Digital Index suggests small business digital skills are still not rising at the rate they should or could be.

Establishing a digital footprint should be the objective of every business across the UK. Modern customers rely on social media for their day-to-day tasks, and businesses should seize this opportunity to relate to them on their level. With the rising numbers of technologically advanced startup businesses, older businesses cannot afford to lag behind. A whole new mindset will need to be embraced, with website design and social media management becoming part of the standard setup of a business.

At the Credit Protection Association, we have already adapted our offices to the modern age. We have introduced online chat to our website, provided our members with a multitude of online tools, and hired social media and GDPR advisers to further help our digital customer. Our debt recovery services have given our members the opportunity to hire website designers, automatons and more impressive technology for their offices. Credit managers and large businesses have an opportunity to make a difference to small businesses and give them the competitive edge they need. By a combination of big business muscle and small business naivety, we can see this digital silver bullet pierce straight through traditional business concepts.