How enterprise mobile apps can strengthen your workforce and decrease costs
Enterprise mobile apps are becoming an integral part of businesses across countless industries. Today, more companies than ever are embracing bring your own device (BYOD) culture and having employees use their own technology for work, especially mobile devices. As such, it is crucial that brands keep up with the expectations of their employees by supplying them with effective and helpful enterprise mobile apps. These can help them perform their jobs in the ways they need today.
However, many companies are still determining how to meet the changing expectations of workforces.
According to a Gartner report, market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations' capacity to deliver them by the end of 2017. With businesses at risk of being outpaced by the exponential demand for enterprise mobile apps, it is important that companies work to empower their employees for steady, healthy growth in mobile work support.
Enterprise Mobile App Benefits That Can Empower Your Company
Moving into the world of mobile enterprise apps may seem daunting for some companies who have not tried such endeavors previously. However, it is important that businesses understand what advantages can come from enterprise mobile app development.
If you are considering what an enterprise mobile app can do for your business, review the following benefits and what you can do to implement apps for your own unique needs as a company.
1. Decreased Costs
Physical documentation, mailing and more business processes done with physical copies drive up the cost of everyday business. Should these important documents be lost or destroyed, the resulting time spent dealing with the fallout will only add to expenditures. While many companies have slowly moved away from paper documentation for their workforces over the years, there are still many business processes and industries that heavily rely on such costly practices. A Small Business and Entrepreneur Council study found that mobile apps can save business costs on a wide variety of matters, including bookkeeping, document sharing and travel, which can quickly add up to thousands of dollars saved. For small businesses, this can add up to more than $14,00 saved per year due to time saved and more than $4,000 per year saved by simplifying tasks like bookkeeping and document sharing. However, the amount saved may increasingly greatly depending on the size of the business, as this study solely focused on companies with at most 20 employees.
Shifting your business practices to digital will reduce or potentially eliminate these costly procedures, as well as greatly reduce the amount of time and effort used to provide employees with the information they need for everyday business. Embracing paperless documentation and consolidating your sources of information will reduce waste and overlapping software costs for a lower day-to-day cost of running your business. Specifically, utilizing a mobile platform will help your employees access your information database without the worry of losing documents, losing time in unnecessarily complicated processes, creating duplicate or inaccurate content from multiple versions being saved on different devices and causing silos to be created between departments when teams cannot access needed information.
2. More Efficient Workforce
One of the key benefits of any mobile device is that it conveniently puts information and access to mobile websites and apps in a person’s hands. For years, that idea was most often seen in the use of social media apps on smartphones, but enterprise mobile apps mean that workers can have access to crucial job information wherever they are, such as field service technicians who need to receive customer location details, needs and schedules with as little delay as possible for efficient work.
Enterprise mobile apps can give employees important data, including everything from HR information to news updates on the latest trends, and decrease time spent finding tools needed to perform their job. Enterprise mobile platforms, like Schneider Electric’s The Exchange, a versatile information hub used by their employees worldwide for day-to-day content management and workflow, can put valuable information into the hands of employees everywhere for an empowered and effective workforce. The modern, digitally empowered workforce can have greater freedom to take quick actions that are informed by readily accessible company policies.
3. Improved Team Connectivity
It can be difficult for nationwide or global companies to coordinate properly across their many locations, but mobile technology takes the connectivity of the modern age and pushes it a step further by opening faster and more direct channels between employees. Enterprise mobile applications integrated with important employee portals and connected to needed databases of information allow team members to stay in touch wherever they are and improve the connection between headquarters and branches. As discussed by eWeek, the amount of companies around the globe using enterprise mobile apps to enable their staff is steadily increasing from year to year, which will continue to alter the landscapes of industries around the world.
Instant connection through mobile devices means that employees and management can communicate quickly within the same office or store if team members are on the move and unable to speak in person or through a desktop. In addition, individual offices can communicate with one another through official but easily accessed channels and headquarters can provide important information worldwide to each individual team member simultaneously, should they have workforces who are consistently out of the office, such as sales teams who may not have access to desktops. The flexibility and effectiveness of this method of communication bridge the gap between company members and can bring the organization closer together, no matter the distance.
4. Improved Customer Engagement
The modern customer expects a company’s employees to have the same wealth of knowledge that can be found on a company’s website. While that may not be possible for even the most educated employee, giving your team members direct and effective access to all the information they need will help them meet these high expectations. For example, Apple Store employees are equipped with smartphones and tablets that link them directly to customer information so that they can identify and help individuals in as little time as possible. Doing so enables customer service through every employee and a greater flexibility in meeting needs without waiting in line for customer service.
As discussed by a Rosetta Consulting survey, highly-engaged customers purchase from a company 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction than the un-engaged. Employee empowerment through enterprise mobile apps can mean a greater degree of engagement. Team members can have direct access to customer information when needed to quickly view a customer’s history with the company, understand their current needs so they can smoothly continue in their journey and effectively answer their questions for a positive experience with the brand. Mobile platforms provide these capabilities in a far more flexible manner than desktop software, with more and more companies pushing away from the tethered nature of desktop workplaces in favor of mobile-enabled work environments. Direct access to customer databases improves employees’ understanding of customers as individuals and improves customer engagement for an overall more effective relationship with target audiences.
Be the Best You Can Be with Mobile Apps
While no two businesses are alike in how enterprise mobile applications will help them, it is important for each company to evaluate what role mobile can play in their ongoing strategies. New avenues toward success and a stronger workforce are possible with the continuous innovations being made in modern enterprise mobile app development.