Why and How to Digitize Your Business with Mobile Apps Today

Relevant Founders Podcast

Listen to our podcast in which tech founders reflect on their journey of building a successful startup and reveal their secrets to success.

Going digital stopped being a buzz term long ago. The Statista claims that nearly half of the world population is active internet users. No wonder that exploring the world or doing business at the fingertips are not trends but an everyday necessity. With the myriad of opportunities, it’s not difficult to digitize your business with the help of software, digitizing your data and apps means to be on the same page with global tendencies.

Digital transformation or digitalization integrated into every aspect of the society, including businesses, government, healthcare, mass media, science, etc. It became a driver for companies’ internal operations and external activities. Business digitalizing as a global phenomenon provokes fundamental changes in how companies operate and how they deliver value to their customers.

What does it mean to go digital for business or to digitize your business?

The increasing investment by businesses in digital initiatives are dictated by the customers who expect services and products delivered to be fast and efficient. This basically means the transformational steps for any business engaging technological advancements step by step, starting from paperless processing and up to heavyweight VR and blockchain. In fact, mastering digitalization is about establishing an updated layer for future new tech applications for making a life of the enterprise more streamlined and introduce new quality of customer experience.

In the struggle to actively embrace the digital trends, the companies move their products and services into the digital environment and build new business models in order not to be left behind. As an example, digital innovators like PayPal, Uber, Airbnb realize conventional, hospitality, financial, retail and transport industries in a completely different manner. And they prove to be successful.

Businesses that do not get accustomed to change soon will become on the verge of extinction.

So, digitizing your business delivers multiple benefits like reduced costs, increased security, and improved productivity to name a few. Among the whole vectors of digital transformation, we’ll touch upon 2 aspects of the digital environment: data and mobility.

Start digitizing your business today

Since 2013 we help companies digitize and build custom software. Our services include business analysis, web and mobile development, AI/ML, cybersecurity, DevOps and cloud services.

Contact us

At information-driven world, it’s data we keep in mind when thinking about digital trends. Making your data digital helps you build a better business.

Firstly, you save on costs and time. Documents in digital format stored in the cloud optimize your expenses. Less office space, fewer folders, less paper, fewer resources to operate on them physically. Printing, sorting, filing requires tons of billable working hours instead of a few clicks of a mouse. Read also about cloud-based software development.

Secondly, you get enhanced performance and productivity. With all the critical business data available in real-time on a mobile device, you and your employees access it any time from virtually everywhere, starting from comprehensive financial information on stock quotes, market data, communication with customers in an efficient way and up to field workers able to communicate all the changes right away.

Thirdly, and vitally. Your data is secure. Needless to mention vulnerability issues when working with physical documents, issues, etc. Sophisticated modern security restrictions to protect data really work well throughout all the industries and vectors globally.

The Generation C

The hyper-connected digital ecosystem generated the need for the companies to offer exclusive and personalized services for their clients.

The Generation C (“Connected”) prefer to interact with service providers via mobile devices and won’t spend time nor efforts for physical presence in a bank to make a transaction, to book a flight at the airline’s company office, or to drive to a restaurant to make a table reservation. Today we would rather enjoy consistency and around-the-clock availability from the providers looking at the screen leveraging the whole capabilities of smartphones.

The world at your fingertips

An overwhelming all-presence of smartphones made its way into daily life. According to Statista, most of the data, internet including, is accessed by using a smartphone and wireless devices: communication, social media, business processes, tracking health, gaming, security surveillance.

So when having better-enhanced customers experience in mind businesses think mobility, as a game-changer in every type of service. In order to get it the right way, mobile applications are now the primary driver to get closer to a customer. They are becoming more of a business standard component of every marketing strategy.

The power of apps

The power of apps is hard to underestimate. Crafted and custom-designed apps paired with specific features and user-friendliness have proved to contain a huge marketing power. Rich functionality, starting from seamless online payments and ordering to gamification and entertainment elements are persuasive enough for consumers to cooperate with their favorite brand on a daily basis.

Companies experience impressive benefit from the ongoing engagements since loyal customers using their app make regular purchases, orders and also recommend the company to their connections. Mobile applications can be an actual ingredient of bringing business marketing and sales development strategy to the next quality level.

Technology evolvement makes it a lot easier today to develop and launch an app for business and equip it with target-specific functionality. This investment really pays off as companies save time and costs for orders processing and fulfillment, receiving vital data and conforming to customers’ requests at the end of the day.

Core advantages of a mobile application for your company:

• No geolocation limits. Your services get a global reach, they can be accessed and processed anywhere irrespective of location. An app is an actionable instrument to extend your offerings to any Internet user, no matter the country or the continent.
• Added value for your customers. Robust apps with enhanced usability help save time and efforts considerably on processing, submitting, feedback and insights sharing. Besides, fast-performing and responsive apps make it a lot more comfortable for customers to follow the news and updates thus get better service insights.
• Marketing on-the-go. A custom app advertises and promotes your products or services in an effective timely manner when a user downloads or launches it. Your marketing strategy efficiently interpreted via modern mobility tools can help target your customers and get a better market reach.
• Increased sales. A responsive app advocates users to instantly utilize offered services anytime and from anywhere in the world. They are a direct channel to connect with the customers and incline them to buy your products or services. WIth the utilization of loyalty programs via mobile as a part of sales strategy and best deals the sales rates prove to be a lot higher.
• Brand awareness. Engaging customers with your branded application is the most likely chance to grow business with brand awareness. Regular interactions and personalized offerings make customers more loyal and consequently more profitable.
• Information sharing. Well-tailored apps provide both general information about a product or service, like prices, forms, news feed and also present new promotions, deals alongside push notifications as a form of direct interaction with customers.
• Social engagement. Mobile apps are the drivers of social life, no matter if one likes the concept or not. They enable users to socialize, watch the news and updates closely, to like, share and comment on products and services through embedded social media buttons. This is not merely a means of communication, but a viable sales driver for the providers.

Types of applications for businesses

There is a massive number of business-oriented apps. They can be classified according to their purpose. There are the following main types of applications:

1. Loyalty apps

These operate as a consistent element of sales strategy across channels and enhance communication, alongside increasing customer spendings. Loyalty systems as a concept enable convenient management of the whole variety of special offers for a specific target audience. These apps collect large volumes of the relevant customer data, including demography or geographical data, they also comprise customer behavioral patterns, interests and buying preferences, as well as transactional data generated in the buying process.

Check out our loyalty app for retailers enabling restaurants and stores increase customer loyalty, as well as bringing valuable advantages to end-users.

2. Office Productivity Apps

These are the applications maintaining round-the-clock office performance information. We can talk about documentation workflow, KPI-oriented employee performance management, metrics and effective internal performance measurement, accounting and everything connected with the business internal operations. Some companies practice the usage of gamification elements within their apps for better inspiration and motivation for the employees. The overall purpose of the office productivity apps is to increase the business productivity, engagement and efficient performance of the employees.

Read about employee time tracking software.

3. Mobile CRM and sales support apps

Mobile CRM (customer relationship management) apps are gaining more popularity in the hyperconnected society. Those help accumulate customer information in a unified database across different channels, collect the status of orders, track history of purchases and interactions (previous and planned), customer service issues, preferences and sentiments, and which is the most important they provide ongoing analysis, reporting and with the launch of AI – predictions. This creates an invaluable data pool for sales, customer engagement, and marketing staff to provide better customer experience at all points of the customer lifecycle, optimize marketing efforts, automate workflows, track performance and increase revenues.

Check out an example of a gamified CRM & ERP SaaS system that motivates and rewards sales agents.

4. Business specific Apps

This is probably the biggest category which includes the industry-oriented apps designed for the particular business needs. Be it an application for a traveling company or insurance provider, they all are promoting the services and offerings of a particular company to its users. In most cases, those are custom-built apps with perfectly designed usability and necessary functionality, instant interaction with the provider and are oriented on an array of the provider’s services.

5. Appointment scheduling apps

Scheduling apps are the necessity for many users nowadays. They help with the management of the online booking and appointments and very often include online payment option. These include a number of vitally important features like automatic dashboarding, booking confirmation, availability calculation, reminders,etc., that help to stay in touch and in tune. Oftentimes they are synchronized with the 3d party applications which makes it very comfortable for a user to control everything across all devices.

Read also about best offshore software development countries and why outsource to Ukraine.

Connected business in the connected world

There is hardly an industry in the modern environment which is immune from disruption. Every business owner is obliged to invest in a strategy, to make a move in order to adopt the technology. The immense potential of the cutting-edge technologies accompanied by connectivity and personalization unlocks new opportunities for businesses, opens new markets and inevitably brings revenue.

Transformational opportunities are capable enough to digitize your businesses so it is ready to respond to the needs of the modern environment. Those are here to help you rely on real-time intelligence, manage your vital data, adopt techniques and methodologies to boost productivity, enable smooth interactions and make your endeavor a profitable and value-bringing venture.

Though the advantages of becoming a data-driven business are well-defined, there might be certain technical challenges to overcome. Discover your capabilities with Relevant Software. Ask for a free consultation.