One of the best things that you can do for your business is to get a handle on managing and syncing data. No matter what industry you are in, your business deals with a tremendous amount of data on a daily basis. From customer names and addresses to copies of invoices, inventory lists, and internal files, most businesses have a lot of information to manage.
If you don’t have a plan in place for how to deal with all of your data, things can quickly get messy. For instance, imagine that you have a customer database that includes your customers’ contact details and information about their accounts. Now, imagine that one of your customers calls in for assistance.
The person who answers the phone helps them with their problem, jotting down notes about their conversation in the customer’s file. Unfortunately, because your data isn’t synchronized, that note is only stored in the local copy of the database and is not uploaded to the companywide version.
Later, that same customer calls back to talk about the problem again. This time, they talk to a different person. Instead of having a record of the previous call included with their account, that customer has to start from scratch, explaining everything all over again, resulting in a poor customer service experience.
Now, imagine that your data was instantly synchronized across your entire business. When that customer called back, the new person they were speaking to would be able to see the notes from the original employee who answered the phone. This would help them better understand what the customer was talking about so that they could get right to work helping them solve their problem. From the customer’s perspective, this provides a much better experience.
This is only one example of why it is so important to manage your data effectively and to regularly sync it. Another example would be if multiple employees were collaborating on a project that used a lot of the same files.
Without data syncing, it would be almost impossible for individual employees to track and monitor changes made by other workers. On the other hand, if the local files were automatically synced with the master files every time they were opened, all of the users could see the changes in real-time, ensuring that everyone was on the same page.
Learning how to effectively manage and sync data for your business is an important skill. This is particularly true if you have data that is stored or accessed in multiple locations.
Even if you have an extremely small business and only have one computer, managing and syncing data is still important. Connecting your computer to the cloud and setting it up to automatically sync your data allows you to always have a current copy of your files in a safe location. That way, you won’t lose your data if something happens to your computer. You can also access your files remotely if you find yourself in a situation where you need to work from somewhere besides your office.