Employee engagement and user satisfaction are the key components that will always lead to high-profit margins, regardless of the industry you operate in. In order to achieve both, however, it is good practice to enable your employees to communicate more quickly and to develop projects more effectively. Let’s take a glance at some of the essential employee satisfaction statistics published by Forbes to pinpoint what we can do going forward.
- Teams which feel more engaged by their employees achieve 21% greater profitability
- Employees who feel their voices are heard perform 4.6 times better than those who feel irrelevant
- 89% of employees happy with their company’s treatment will recommend it as a good place to work
- 87% of employees expect company support in regards to balancing personal and professional lives
This is what makes custom apps such a great investment, whether you choose to focus on iOS or Android. Not only do custom apps enable employees to engage with projects through remote work but also allow them to stay in touch with colleagues 24/7. However, building such an app for your company can seem like an expensive undertaking, especially if you operate as a small business or startup. Let’s take a closer look at several convincing and practical reasons as to why you should invest in a custom app for your business.
Reasons to make a custom app for your business
- Custom-Tailored Features
The first and most important reason to consider building a custom app for your business is its customization features. More specifically, by building an app from scratch, you will be able to pick and choose which features to add for your employees’ convenience.
This functionality extends further if you operate as an eCommerce business and want to provide worldwide customers with a custom platform to shop on. Having full control over your app’s code and list of features is undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons why you should consider the DIY approach. Such an approach would eliminate unnecessary slowdown, clutter, bandwidth and power resources necessary for your employees/customers to use the app as intended.
- Personalized Employee Engagement
As we’ve mentioned previously, employees love it when their companies care about their wellbeing beyond rudimentary productivity assessment. Thus, building a custom app can open a plethora of employee engagement and personalization opportunities for you to explore. Let’s take a look at data published by Small Biz Trends to further illustrate employees’ reliance on smart devices:
- 51% of US employees read, answer calls and engage with work-related emails in their home bathrooms
- 48% of employees spend an hour a day or more checking their smart devices for work-related reasons
- 55% of employees would rather bring and use their own phones to work rather than use office tech
- 65% of Chief Information Officers said that this step in workforce evolution presents a serious challenge
Gamification, personalization and general interest in employee wellbeing are welcome. Enable your employees to interact with colleagues, pitch ideas, offer feedback and generally affect how workflow and project development will move forward through an app. That way, you will have a centralized communication hub to reach out to individual employees and also have access to their suggestions, thoughts and feedback.
- Streamlined App Updates
Given the fact that custom apps are built in-house, you will never come across a situation where you depend on the developer for much-needed updates. Instead, your in-house team can take care of necessary bug fixing, feature updates, employee notifications and company-wide announcements.
Similarly, eCommerce-centric apps can be treated the same way, ensuring that new products and sales opportunities launch exactly the way you want them to. This would eliminate expenses in regards to switching app versions and releases or contract renewals with developers given that your company would use their app.
- Scalable Cross-Platform Integration
Depending on the industry you operate in, cross-platform functionality and synchronization with CRM or other software might become necessary over time. However, integrating such features into apps which are owned by other brands and simply rented to your company won’t be possible without crippling expenses.
Using reliable writing services to outline your custom app’s cross-platform functionality list will allow you to quickly assess the viability of such a development plan. If you want to enable employees to share team building content to social media platforms – you can. Likewise, if you want eCommerce customers to quickly submit testimonials as UGC for your benefit – you can do that as well. Building a custom app with your business model and portfolio in mind will allow you to choose which platforms, services and payment methods to integrate.
- Increased Data Security
Personal information and corporate data security have become a hot topic given the increasing emphasis on office networking and widespread access to smart devices. Providing your employees with a sense of security and trust in their company is pivotal, which is what a custom app can do for you.
Custom apps built specifically for the purposes of certain industries and niches have very few security flaws given their unique application. Your development team will thus have full knowledge and overview of code built into the app, ensuring that it can protect employee data from malware. ID verification features can further improve your custom app’s viability for company-wide use, making sure that even stolen devices cannot be used illicitly.
- Higher Long-Term Profitability
Lastly, profit margins are a reality of conducting business, whether it’s SAAS, eCommerce or otherwise. Building a custom app will result in momentary downtime in regards to productivity which will quickly bounce back once the app is launched.
After that, maintaining, updating and building on the solid foundations set by your custom app will be a matter of creativity and necessity. Using a custom app for your business will result in enormous savings in terms of monetary resources which would otherwise be allocated toward subscription renewals. Likewise, if your app is successful enough and alluring to B2B stakeholders, you can outsource its license and gain further monetary value from building it.
Custom App Development Mistakes to Avoid
Now that we have a better understanding of the value behind building a custom app, let’s briefly touch on several pitfalls worth keeping in mind. While a custom app will certainly elevate your business beyond its current operational capacities, you should also be wary of making mistakes along the way. With that, some of the missteps you should keep a close eye out for during development and post-launch include:
- Lack of competitor research – what are the industry standards
- Lack of goals, budget and timeline planning prior to development
- Too many features and functions integrated “just in case”
- Unrealistic expectations from your development team
- Emphasis on visual design over functionality and stability
Changes on the Horizon (Conclusion)
While building a custom app for your company from scratch may seem like a waste of time and resources, the market would beg to differ. Large corporations, eCommerce platforms and startups alike have adopted the strategy of developing internal applications rather than relying on publicly available collaboration apps.
Your team and you can create a unique work environment where creative solutions and teamwork are the norms, not an exception. Change is on the horizon, and it’s up to you to develop a custom app for your business in order to meet incoming networking standards.
Bio: Dorian Martin is a professional Content Creator and Editor at a professional academic writing service (click here to find out more). His career consists of research, writing and publishing articles, case studies and essays on trending digital industry developments. In his spare time, Dorian enjoys catching up with his favourite blogs and writing for his personal business blog.