The business landscape is changing daily, and with it, the associated challenges. Both macro and microeconomic problems play a huge role in influencing a business’s success.
While there’s not much a business can do to control and tip macroeconomic factors—inflation, fiscal policy, national income, and international trade relationships—in its favor, it can sway key microeconomic factors—customer retention, employee satisfaction, investor availability, increased competition, and supply chain management—to reap benefits.
But how can they do that?
How Can Businesses Solve Unique Challenges in 2022?
Nearly 347,000 new businesses were established in the US in the first quarter of 2022. Although there’s a dip in the numbers from the previous quarter, it’s still enough to signify an increase in competition from the previous year.
It’s difficult for businesses to survive and remain relevant in today’s competitive landscape.
There’s no dearth of challenges faced by businesses each day. While they can predict and take corrective measures against some challenges, they can’t forecast and manage others.
Some common challenges faced by businesses today are:
- Business continuity
- Customer satisfaction
- Maintaining cash flow
- Increased competition
- Employee recruitment and retention
- Capturing market share
- Pivoting and changing business operations as per market trends
Although these are the top challenges plaguing a business, the list is non-exhaustive.
If only businesses had a magical lamp, they could rub to summon a genie who’d take care of all of their problems for them.
But what if we told you that it’s possible? What if we told you that you could have your genie and ask him for more than three wishes, and all you’d have to do is use available apps or develop custom ones?
Sounds magical and fantastical, doesn’t it?
Should businesses depend on apps to solve their problems?
In this day and age of modern technology, you can say goodbye to, or at the very least, control most of your business problems with custom mobile apps.
Custom apps are the modern-day genie in a bottle (read: phone) and have the power to cater to most of your business challenges. The best part? You can skip dedicated training sessions for your employees.
Wondering how is this possible? It might seem like apps are a godsend and possess mythical properties, but we assure you, there’s no sorcery involved.
Currently, there are over 6.5 billion smartphone users in the world, spending nearly 88% of their mobile time on apps.
Business apps can not just help you take care of your problems, streamline business processes, and make your employees’ life easier but also have a positive impact on your bottom line.
Apps can also aid businesses in:
- increasing their referral and adoption rates,
- enhancing customer engagement,
- deriving actionable data to understand customer habits,
- growing business digitally, and
- improving relationships with their customers.
7 App ideas businesses can use to tackle unique challenges
A custom mobile business app is a great idea to tackle your problems head-on.
All you need to do is identify your pain points, and you’ll probably find apps to solve them. Or you can also get custom business mobile apps developed from mobile app development companies if you wish to find the solution for a specific issue.
Listed below are a few ideas for apps you can use to take care of your business’s challenges:
- Car parking
Just imagine you leave your home on time for work only to reach your office late. This happens when you’ve to circle the block twice, possibly thrice, to find a parking spot that’s 20-minutes away from your office.
This is a daily occurrence for most of your employees since it’s often difficult for them to find dedicated parking slots. Or maybe you’ve only a limited number of slots available, which is disadvantageous for employees who live far or have other obligations.
This leads to a waste of time and frustrates them to no end. The primary reason they opt to drive to work is convenience; if that’s not available to them, it’s bound to leave them annoyed and angry, lowering employee satisfaction.
Non-availability or limited availability of car parking slots might also sow seeds of resentment amongst your employees if they race with their colleagues to snatch a desirable parking spot.
A bad start to your employee’s day can negatively impact their productivity and derail their plans for the day. Luckily, you can take matters into your hands before they worsen and employ a parking booking system.
A parking booking system aids employees in easily finding available car parking slots in real-time, booking a parking slot, and confirming their booking via a mobile app. It also tracks cancellations and delays, freeing up the parking slot if the supposed user doesn’t show up or is running late.
Businesses can also customize parking booking systems to gather useful data to schedule slots per their requirements, saving employees time and effort and offering added convenience.
- Customer relationship
Customers are the sun to a business’s moon. Hence, what business wouldn’t like to benefit from a loyal customer base of repeat customers? But how can you achieve that?
Your product or service will play a huge role in helping you build a loyal customer base, but there are other deciding factors. Today, you must offer your customers a superior user experience to retain them.
Your mobile website is no longer the holy grail for your business; mobile apps are.
Customers prefer and expect a seamless user experience from a business and, to that extent, are willing to download custom mobile apps. As per statistics, there were approximately 230 billion app downloads in 2021.
Optimizing user experience through custom mobile apps can help you:
- get a significant return on your investment,
- gain deeper insights into your customer’s preferences,
- target consumers through in-app or push notifications,
- immaculate integration of products, services, and data,
- efficient marketing of new products or services,
- personalize customer service,
- enhance customer retention, and
- build a stable customer relationship.
Apps are essential for a business to strive and thrive in today’s dynamic landscape.
- Internal communication
You may offer the best-in-class products or services, but you can only capitalize on them if your internal teams are in sync.
Effective internal communication is vital to boost employees’ productivity and improve your bottom line. Clear communication is the cornerstone for improving employee engagement, alignment, performance, collaboration, and team spirit.
But how can you achieve that?
Well, mobile apps for communication can assist you in promoting synergy amongst your employees.
- Recruiting talent
HRs and managers spend significant time sorting applications to fill a job role.
Manual sorting of applications is a time-consuming and stressful task. Sorting is step one of the process. Reaching out to short-listed applicants, scheduling interviews, sending them tasks, and gauging their fit culturally, is a different ball game.
Overhaul your long-drawn practices and invest in custom mobile apps to automate the hiring process and recruit the right talent without wasting time, effort, and resources.
Through apps, you can easily track the applicants and highlight their strengths and weaknesses for future reference. Moreover, you can also create your own interview questions app to personalize the process.
- Process efficiency
A business with increased process efficiency always has the upper hand since it can not just predict but also make changes to its operations as per market trends.
But how can they do that? How can they tap into market trends, improve their processes based on these trends, and make sound business decisions?
Through the availability of data.
Data is a goldmine for businesses, but large data or data that can’t inform business decisions in real time is of no use to businesses.
Custom apps can help you collect market-specific data to gain actionable insights to make your business gain a competitive edge.
- Managing reputation online
Online reputation can make or break a business since almost nine out ten customers read reviews online before buying a product or service from a brand.
Reviews are an integral part of a customer’s buying decision. Hence, it’s incredibly important that you actively manage your business’s online reputation. But this is not an easy task.
Tracking your business’s digital footprint, engaging with customers (existing and potential), addressing grievances, identifying happy customers, and maintaining your business’s reputation online is a job in itself.
Apps can help you tackle this problem swiftly and effortlessly.
- Transparency in supply chain
The supply chain forms the backbone of most businesses. Apps can help businesses gain visibility into this process to manage their supply chain efficiency by providing a business:
- secure access to data,
- real-time tracking of deliveries,
- order tracking, and
- manage their levels of inventory.
Apps help modern businesses find a solution to problems
Apps are necessary for businesses of all types and sizes to remain relevant, improve customer experience, gain market share, develop effective outreach strategies, and increase their profit margin.
Functional apps are the need of the hour for businesses to tackle and take advantage of unique business challenges.
Author Bio: Arjun Ruparelia
Email – [email protected]
An accountant turned writer, Arjun writes financial blog posts and research reports for clients across the globe. Arjun has five years of financial writing experience across verticals. He is a CMA and CA (Intermediate) by qualification.