Insights
Applications (“apps”) are at the heart of business in the 21st century. Web apps, mobile apps, and cloud apps are everywhere. Just as finding an organization without computers was nearly impossible 20 years ago, today, you won’t find one without a suite of apps operating their entire internal and external systems. From customer service applications to enterprise financial applications and SAP software applications, selecting the right software can be a daunting challenge.
Well-designed software can streamline your processes and boost your organization’s efficiency, helping your bottom line. But, how do you select the right software or application? What works for one organization may not work for another, so copying from others may not be the best approach.
The challenge is knowing which applications are most suitable for your business. Our team of experts will work with you to evaluate your company’s needs and recommend applications to fit. If one doesn’t exist, we can help develop a custom application to cater to your needs.
The lighthearted joke “there’s an app for that” has an element of truth. Apps have rapidly replaced the day-to-day tasks performed with a pen and paper. But not all are relevant to your business.
Where to start?
Before you look for a technical solution, identify the business problem technology can solve. Develop a digital transformation roadmap to ensure the organization heads in the right direction. Our experts have helped numerous clients with developing digital roadmaps and executed them successfully.
Analyze your needs
Once you have a plan or roadmap developed, breakdown your vision into tangible and attainable goals. Use these goals to identify and prioritize your use cases and look to the market for available solutions. For instance, if you work in the retail industry, then the point of sale may be your highest priority. Start by looking at your existing system and research available and modern alternatives.
When you’re ready to begin shopping for applications, let us help you proceed with caution. We will assist you in selecting apps suited to your specific needs. Our philosophy is never to purchase or develop applications for our clients until we’ve reached a consensus of precisely what you need and what works in the long term.
We take a holistic approach and conduct vendor assessments, tool comparison, and market research to ensure the best possible tool fit for a given business need. Our clients trust us to make the right decisions for them and their organization.
Do your homework
It’s about more than choosing the application presumed to be “modern” or “trending.” Together we identify the tool most suitable for your team, goals, and workflows. Your competition might be using a particular application, but it may not be the most relevant to your team.
If you are thorough with your research upfront, it helps you avoid the trap of selecting the first application to meet most of your needs but not all of them. Our experience has shown us companies who don’t do their research will inevitably switch applications further down the road, which is a painful process. Take your time. Make sure the application you choose addresses your specific needs and provides value over the most extended period. Do not settle on the first application you find!
You get what you pay for
Most companies say cost is the primary factor when choosing their application software. Fortunately, plenty of very inexpensive customer experience applications and digital applications are currently available on the market. However, you shouldn’t make your choice solely based on cost. Always consider price, but pay for value. Focus on usability, integration capabilities, and best-of-breed tools most fit to help your organization meet its goals. It's vital to remember applications can be expensive. But if it fits a need and helps your company do more, it will pay for itself over time.
Customize apps for your needs
It’s not uncommon to find products and applications to meet most but not all of your business needs. But, applications are customizable to cover the remaining use cases and fit your business process. Customization comes in different ways—app utilization, deployment, data capture, and much more. Beyond tweaking the product, customizing your experience ensures support cost stays manageable while the business can operate with the application’s features provided out-of-the-box.
Most applications nowadays provide flexibility and extensibility to be customized for advanced use cases. By using Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs), these applications can solve problems, talk to other systems, help with reporting, and more, letting businesses get more value out of the application.
Integrate everything
By integrating all your workflows, you maximize the value of your apps. No one application can address all your organizations’ use cases. You can use a customer relations management (CRM) application to store customer information and interactions or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to manage company resources. Your human resource (HR) department may use a personnel management system, and Payroll may use another, and so on. To get the most value out of a system, your applications need to communicate.
Total communication allows you to gather and analyze real-time data from all units of the organization in a singular platform, which empowers data-driven decisions for achieving growth goals. It also enables workflows and process automation to reduce errors and maximize productivity. For example, link a spreadsheet with your CRM, and connect it to your newly purchased email marketing app. Suddenly you’ll have your marketing automation workflow without needing any new software. It’s an easy and economical way to take full advantage of your applications.
Communicate, communicate, communicate for better adoption
Don't just find a new application. Make sure everyone on your team is using it—and using it the same way. Your team has to stay on the same page to ensure the application is sufficient.
Communicate everything and anything regarding your application choice. Inform your team why you chose this app, what problems it solves, and how to use it effectively in your work. You might even consider creating internal documentation for instructions on using the application for everyone to utilize.
If your team has trouble communicating effectively, bring them together via an online learning platform and instruct them how to use the app properly. Everyone must know how to use the app and its purpose.
ChaiOne-Matching you with the most suitable applications
Choosing the correct apps is an exhausting, time-consuming process, involving countless hours of research, trial and error, and inevitably some failure. Let us help. We've done the research, we know the market has to offer, and we understand your company's industry. We're in a knowledgeable position to help you choose an application to fits your needs better than the others. See how it works, or contact us today, and let us help you make this choice an easy and enjoyable one.
