Your Business, Your App: How Tech Can Take You Further

Technology can transform businesses. At ImagePlus, we’ve designed countless unique new apps for our clients, and they have each released serious benefits for customers and employees alike. Together, we build brilliant apps that make a real difference.

When it comes to innovation, success is often measured at the moment when people stop thinking about it. After all, do you stop to ask how your central heating works, or your TV? Or do you just turn them on?

As apps have become more and more common, we’ve begun to treat them in the same way: they are just useful widgets that sit on our phone, right? Scroll along, tap the icon, and let them do their job.

Well, sure. But, for businesses, it really is worth thinking a bit more deeply about how apps operate. Given proper attention, they can unlock new revenue, new efficiencies, even new capacity in your business. We wanted to talk a little bit about how.

What Is An App?

Let’s start with the basics. An app is a tool. It’s a very often quite specialised piece of software designed to do a few things really well – that is, easily, simply, quickly. Convenience and utility should be the watchwords of all apps.

Of course, the joy of an app is that it’s mobile. Whether on a smartphone, tablet or otherwise, this tool can go with you wherever you are, and give you instant access to really useful functionality on the go. It solves a problem you experience often, and makes your life easier. 

In this way, a great app becomes a trusted go-to, a seamless part of your daily routine. The key is that the app has put its user at the centre: it has understood their need, and it has found the quickest, smartest way to meet it.

What Is App Development?

There are two elements to app development: understanding the problem and building the solution. For an app to make sense for your business, deliver ROI and be successful, it needs to either: save money, save time, or make money

At ImagePlus, our top tech teams are on hand to use all the latest gadgets and know-how to build something brilliant. But first, we put special emphasis on talking to our clients, and getting to know their business. We map how everything fits together so we understand where the room for improvements might be.

Apps perform their best when they’re solving a real problem. What parts of your business could benefit from a smart, agile solution? And how can we build something to fill that gap?

How An App Can Help Your Customers?

How does your business currently serve its clients? And in what areas might that service be usefully enhanced or expanded? Apps can often provide a turb-charge to your customer service.

For example, we’re all used to app notifications – those little pushes that offer personalised communication between business and user, sending news of offers, sales, discounts and more. Speaking directly to your audience whenever you want, with no action on the part of the user required to trigger the message and reliance on third-party platforms like email or social media, can be priceless.

The key is that communicating with your customers using apps improves their experience of your brand. Apps gather information about users with which business can design personalised services; likewise, apps are always open – no more checking office hours for your customers.

This delivers enhanced brand visibility and recognition, deeper customers relationships that will improve retention – and a platform for recruiting new customers and expanding your client base who will be attracted by this new, easy-to-use storefront.

How An App Can Help Your Business

If transforming how you can serve customers isn’t enough, apps can also revolutionise your organisation’s processes, releasing savings and streamlining working practices.

Whatever the current bottle-necks or chicanes in your systems, apps can help reduce their impact on your efficiency. They can automate manual processes, link individuals and departments more cleanly and productively, and remove duplication in workflows. Remember: a good app is a specialised tool that becomes part of a user’s daily routine.

Just as push notifications can transform your customer comms, so can instant communication help provide your staff with reminders so tasks don’t get forgotten! Not only that, but apps can offer tracking data so you can understand what information you’re missing, where incomplete work is sitting in your organisation, and how to drive further improvements in future.

Learning To Fly

In other words, your business can benefit from an app if it’s designed to fill a need you already have. Whether customer communication or internal process improvement, if together we can find where your business needs a little help, then our tech experts at ImagePlus can build an app that will bring you real benefits.

So unlock your phone and fire up your favourite app – but this time, a bit more mindfully. What might the best app for your business look like? And how we can help you make it a reality? Drop us a line, we’d love to get chatting.