What Can Businesses Expect in 2023?

2023 is right around the corner, and if the past few years are any indication, it will be rife with challenges for businesses to overcome. Let’s consider some of these challenges, and what technologies can help minimize or even eliminate them.

Inflation and Supply Chain Issues Will Likely Continue

Unfortunately, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy is expected to persist throughout 2023. Exacerbating these issues, the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia has not helped matters in terms of supply chain stability. Now and moving forward, businesses need to plan for any supply chain disruptions or impacts of inflation…but how can this be accomplished?

When economic conditions are fraught with such risk, it is important that you are able to identify how vulnerable your operations are to the whims of the aforementioned challenges. By doing so, you’ll be in a better position to minimize or completely eliminate your vulnerability to these factors.

Customer Experience and Sustainability Will Be Priorities

Based on how 2023 looks to be shaping up, it will be important for you to address your customers’, clients’, and prospects’ priorities—which seem to be focused on sustainable operations. With more focus put on a company’s stance on assorted social and environmental issues, it will be important that businesses are able to identify where their current strategies and initiatives may be received poorly or have a negative impact on the company’s reputation—including those strategies that involve external parties, like cloud providers and the data centers they rely on, and how the impacts these parties have affected the business by association. 

Likewise, your customers, clients, and prospects need more than just the assurance that you’re operating in an environmentally conscious way…they will want to be wooed, and in a more personalized and interactive way. This will also require the right IT to be in place, deployed so that workflows are streamlined and enhanced through technologies that have developed to the point that many of these responsibilities are resolved through automation. This not only ensures that the right processes are carried out in a timely manner, it allows your team members to divert their energies toward more gainful endeavors.

Employee Retention Will Require Effort

Since the onset of the pandemic, many businesses have struggled to keep their employees engaged, with many of these workers either leaving work as part of what has been called “The Great Resignation,” or participating in the more recent trend of “quiet quitting,” or strictly adhering to exclusively the responsibilities outlined in their job description and doing nothing more.

It is on the employer to then work to retain their employees through meaningful and fulfilling work and the benefits associated with it. Allowing for hybrid work is a great means of doing so, along with opportunities for upward mobility and increased pay and benefits.

What is Your Business Doing to Prepare for 2023?

Whatever it is, Preferred can help you manage the IT that it requires. Give us a call at 708-781-7110 to speak to us about what we can do for you.