Mike Miranda writes about enterprise software and covers products offered by software companies like www.rocketsoftware.com about topics such as Terminal Emulation, Legacy Modernization, Enterprise Search, Big Data and Enterprise Mobility.
In the digital age, it’s more important than ever before that you fully understand the various tools, platforms and software available to your company. Picking the right one could be the decision that rockets your organization past the competition. At the same time, making the wrong choice or simply ignoring your options could be the reason why your competitors make quick work of you in the near future. One important piece of technology you should absolutely be leveraging for your business is mobile apps. Though many people think of the kind we all have on our mobile devices for the sake of entertainment, the truth is they could help your company in a number of ways.
Enhance Your Company’s Image
No one wants to do business with a company that seems to be stuck in yesteryear. Instead, they want to know that your organization is knowledgeable in today’s technology. Having an enterprise mobile app will help validate your business as one that is constantly on the cutting edge.
You Can’t Trust Non-Enterprise Apps
Even though most of the ones you’ll find on a person’s mobile device are there to entertain, there are countless apps out there meant to help people with business issues. Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Bump, and Tripit are just a handful of examples. People all over the world swear by them and they have each inspired a number of imitators.
The thing is the people who love these apps most likely don’t work for large enterprises like yours. If they do, their management probably won’t be too happy if they find out that their employee is using a non-proprietary app for business purposes.
With enterprise mobile apps, you can create a solution for exactly what you need and fortify it with all the security protocols necessary to ensure your business is never exposed to unnecessary risk.
Enterprise Mobility Is Easier Than Ever
Another great thing about enterprise mobile apps—and a reason to adopt them in and of itself—is how easy it makes it for your company to adopt enterprise mobility. For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, enterprise mobility is the practice of foregoing the traditional office setting and instead allowing customers to work from just about anywhere on the planet
Enterprise mobility comes with some fairly obvious benefits. You can hire someone from anywhere on Earth and allow them to work right where they are. It also means a more affordable infrastructure and all kinds of scalability solutions.
Add a mobile app to your enterprise mobility strategy and you’ll have an even easier time getting the most from this strategy.
Speed Through the Sales Process
Anytime you have a sales solution that includes a cloud aspect to it, you’re going to have a quicker sales cycle. This has been proven time and time again. It doesn’t get much more cloud based than an app, which means your enterprise mobile application can help you process customers faster than ever before.
Connect to Customers with Ease
Don’t forget that enterprise apps aren’t just for your employees. While they will definitely represent the main group using them, one of the nice things about having an enterprise mobile app is that you can also allow third parties to download them as well.
The next time you take on a business partner, one of the selling points for the partnership could be that you have really great enterprise mobile apps to offer them. Once they download the app, not only will they see better results for their company, they’ll also have an easier time communicating with your employees and/or getting important information from your company.
Obviously, the same can be said for your customers too. Once they have your enterprise app, you’re connected to them, making communication a simple task. You can even benefit from better analytics and reporting too.
Find Inefficiencies
Another awesome benefit that enterprise mobile apps provide your organization is one we just touched on: analytics and reporting. If you know anything about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you know that these two items are absolutely essential to establishing a productive web presence. Without detailed analytics and reliable reporting, you’ll have no way of knowing how well your online campaign is actually performing.
Once you’re done designing your enterprise mobile app and have it out working in the real world, the next step should be creating reporting processes that can produce analytics regarding the performance of the app.
What you want to look for is possible inefficiencies in your workforce. If you’ve only just recently adopted enterprise mobility, then it’s very possible that you have quite a few at the moment. The best way to iron them out would be to look over your analytics and find where things aren’t working as well as you’d like.
Forecast for the Future
All the data you get from your reporting is good for more than just finding inefficiencies though. Enterprise mobile apps could also be one of the best tools you have for forecasting what’s going to happen in the future.
Use the analytics you receive to look for trends and then use those trends to predict the future performance of your employees. This will help you design more efficient workflows and see when and where some of your staff should be reallocated to other purposes.
Any company that can properly forecast what will happen in the months and years to come will be that much more likely to succeed and avoid unnecessary problems.
Say Goodbye to “Out of Office”
If your company doesn’t have enterprise mobile apps, then the “Out of Office” response is probably a fairly typical reaction to some of the emails you send throughout your organization.
Sometimes they’re necessary, of course. If someone is on vacation, they shouldn’t be answering their messages. However, sometimes they show up because an employee is traveling for work or on site at client’s location.
Whatever the case, these auto-responses no longer need to cost your company in terms of employee performance. By being able to quickly log into your internal system, employees can be active from client sites, hotels, airports or anywhere else their work trips take them.
They’re Affordable
If all of these benefits seem a bit too good to be true, you might expect that the other shoe will soon drop and it will be in the form of a price tag. The good news is this isn’t the case. In today’s day and age, there are more developers than ever before, meaning it’s a buyer’s market as far as enterprise mobile apps go. You can get one made specific to your organization’s needs and have it updated as time goes on, yet it will still be extremely affordable when you consider all it can do for you.
Get Rid of Paperwork
Lastly and along the same lines of the above, apps mean less paperwork. They always do. You don’t have to sacrifice quality by lacking paperwork, of course, but you also don’t have to accept exorbitant overheads either. Save money on paper and waste services by taking more of your business virtual.