The globe is digital. Surviving in such an environment is impossible without digital transformation. However, it's encouraging that 91% of businesses have embraced digital initiatives to reach their customers and promote efficiency within their operations. Enterprise apps are the main piece of the jigsaw. Now, businesses can lower costs, boost internal processes, and enrich customer experience. However, about 84% of businesses don't succeed in digital transformation efforts. For instance, only 0.01 % of mobile apps achieved commercial success in 2018. But all hope is not lost. Let's have a look at the importance of digital transformation, the pitfalls to avoid when developing your next big enterprise app, and things to do before, during, and after the development process.
What is Digital Transformation, and Why is it Important?
Digital transformation is the application of technology to revolutionize your business' operations. It's an opportunity to reinvent business processes, organizational culture, and customer experiences to deliver value and cope with dynamic market requirements. Customers' and employees' mindsets are evolving thanks to emerging and changing technologies. Therefore, robust digital solutions are a necessity. Integration of these products across your business allows them to seamlessly access data and processes. The result is business growth and protection of your competitive edge. Here are a few benefits of digital transformation:
- Enriched client experience: the transformation enhances easy, fast, and valuable solutions to their problems. With digital platforms, you gather feedback, engage in target marketing, and resolve complaints.
- Data-based insights: with digital transformation, you enjoy transparent and accurate metrics tracking. You need the data for optimization of operations and strategize your next action.
- Reduced costs and better profits: these are the ultimate advantages. Digitization boosts sales and improves savings by phasing out slow and error-prone manual interventions.
- Better innovation and agility: it supports innovative and agile ways of meeting customer needs.
- Improved market penetration: you gain more clients as you penetrate new markets. As such, your customer base and loyalty increase.
- Informed decision making: sufficient data facilitates informed strategies. The customer is the king. Digital transformation aims at understanding the clients' behavior and needs. The executives can use the feedback to create an exact fit for them.
What Are the Pitfalls of Enterprise App Development?
Are you looking to create a robust enterprise mobile app? Your chances of success will increase if you do things right from the get-go. Give your users a listening ear, test your product, deliver excellent UI and UX, and obtain buy-in from the executive team on digital transformation benefits. Some common pitfalls when building enterprise applications tend to haunt businesses during this crucial initiative. Let's discuss them to help you know their nature, avoid them, and build a product that stands out.
Development of Too Many Features
It's tempting to think that customers will embrace all the features you throw into the application. But the truth is that this action only increases cumbersomeness. You'll have to spend more time and money to develop it. After releasing it, negative feedback about slow performance will start pouring in. Quality is better than quantity. Therefore, it's crucial to stick with essential and unique functions that will meet or exceed customers' expectations. Then, you can upgrade the application with extra features based on customer feedback.
Setting an Unrealistic Budget
Let's face it, tailoring an app to serve a particular organization can be expensive. It requires highly-skilled designers, developers, marketing personnel, and other experts. The process can also go up to several months for complex requirements of functionalities and features. Technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Augmented Reality (AR) are continuing to shape the mobile industry each year. These changes mean more complications and requirements regarding time and resources. Proper planning up to the cent is necessary. You'll need to discuss requirements and assess the overall budget with contractors.
Ignoring the Impact Good Design Can Have on Adoption and Engagement
Trying to force your website to fit a mobile environment only leads to poor UX and UI. Failure to develop your mobile strategy before building a mobile app leads to a product that isn't intuitive. Your audience will shy away from switching to the new app. Focus on developing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that supports mobile devices. Additionally, remember to bring in an experienced design team that understands their trade regarding UX, UI, and mobile app design.
Insufficient Testing - Building Something Nobody Wants
Without proper testing, your released app may not serve the intended purpose or crash when traffic increases. A poorly-developed app leads to frustration among employees, leading to low morale. And for external customers, negative reviews, negative brand image, and loss of users can ensue. Test your application's back-end before releasing it. Do you lack the necessary skills? Hire a quality assurance team that knows its trade inside out.
Failing to Build a Marketing Strategy
The app stores are already awash with many apps. And many more are continuing to pour in daily. That means stiff competition. So a poor app marketing strategy cannot cut it. It's critical to remember the competition when building enterprise applications.
Therefore, think about marketing before investing your time, money, and efforts. Conduct market research, optimize your app page, market it in social media, build reviews and testimonials, and promote the app through influencers. Be sure to explain the advantages and working of the app.
Not Building a Cohesive Style Between the Brand and the Product
Lack of brand cohesiveness across your apps and digital media denies your business a chance to cement its recognition, boost trust, and strengthen brand identity. Furthermore, your brand will fail to create a memorable experience among your audience, leading to lost conversions and opportunities.
So don't stop at just slapping a cool logo on your app page. If you're looking to stand out from the cut-throat competition, it's time to improve style cohesiveness between your app and brand.
Carefully choose your style regarding graphics, fonts, illustrations, tone of voice, and colors. Then remain consistent with them on your application, website, social media platforms, and other marketing materials.
Building Too Many Platforms, or the Wrong Platforms
Developing and building enterprise applications on every platform you think of can be tempting. After all, who doesn't want to reach as many users as possible? But your app will most definitely require modification once users begin interacting with it. As users' feedback starts rolling in, you'll learn a lot regarding their behavior. The customer is king, right? So you may have to change, add, modify, or remove the app's features to make it fit in with the customers. That's why it's better to focus on one or a few platforms, enrich the app based on user feedback, then branch out to others. That way, you won't spend too much money or time attempting to modify the product for every platform.
Ignoring Bad Feedback
Let's face it, pleasing everyone is impossible. You'll likely get several negative reviews on the app page and elsewhere.
But the main push for improvements lies in this feedback. And anyone's review may represent the views of a thousand others who feel the same but remain silent. Offer a listening ear to those one-star reviews that come with long, complaining paragraphs. Respond to them, change the app where necessary, or validate any decision if you're looking to win these customers. That way, it shows you value their time and feedback.
Putting It Together
As seen above, the pitfalls when building enterprise applications translate to embarrassment and loss of the organization's resources. The ripple effect is the loss of potential and existing customers, plus a negative brand image. Restoring your public image can be a hard nut to crack in this digital age. So be sure to get it right using these tips:
Before Development
- Define your application's scope
- Research its usability
- Decide on its architecture
- Work on developing great UI and UX
- Avoid features overload
- Choose a product owner to manage the development of the app
- Introduce the world of digital transformation to your employees and be sure they grasp its importance to the company
- Only concentrate on transforming a process at the time
During Development
- Test your product with real users and quality assurance team
- Start marketing way before completion of marketing
- Be sure your solution can accommodate the required number of new users
- Before adding new features, be sure the initial ones are working as intended. You better give users a few but well-done things rather than implementing many poorly-done features.
- Listen to your audience and try implementing what they require
- Carry out A/B tests for feature launches
Post-launch
- Implement an onboarding process: sell the value and benefits, showcase functionality, make the registration easy, and direct them to a CTA
- Address the feedback
- Monitor feature usage using app analytics
- Track churn to see where the traffic is dying off
- Run user acquisition campaigns, ensuring you're targeting the right audience
- Optimize your UI: adjust interface and color scheme for a more intuitive app. Also, humanize, simplify if necessary, and improve workflow
- Personalize the app's experience: geotagging, saving user preferences, cross-channel integration, customized push, and storing a history of action
Building an enterprise app is not as easy as it appears. Furthermore, the journey is full of pitfalls that threaten to halt the process, injure a business image, and lead to losses. But, with the right enterprise app development team, you can easily evade all these pitfalls.
Brightscout is an industry leader in creating polished brand and app experiences for technology companies. Contact us to learn more about our services and see how we can be an excellent fit for your business.