How To Gain a Competitive Advantage With Your Enterprise Mobile App Strategy? 5 Tips to Follow
Photo by Scott Webb
How effective is your enterprise mobile app strategy exactly? Every digital marketer just loves to talk about consumer-facing apps and they probably have a good reason for it. They share your brand’s message and value proposition with the rest of the world.
But there’s one more thing that remains somewhat overlooked. Yet, it’s something that can provide smart companies with a definitive edge over their competition by easing tasks, increasing work productivity, and building connections with consumers like never before. So, say hello to enterprise mobile apps.
A survey across 1,500 enterprise decision-makers conducted by Adobe revealed that 61 percent of them tend to believe that companies put themselves at risk by not embracing mobile applications.
What’s more interesting, however, is that 66% of them also said that they are lagging behind their competitors when it comes to their enterprise mobile apps. Hence, this is where the importance of a proper and precise strategy steps into the picture.
You probably know where this is headed to. Following are a few tips for creating a cutthroat enterprise mobile app strategy that could give you the competitive edge you so desperately need.
Focus On Mission-Critical Applications
Citing Adobe’s study, the high-ranked officials who took part in it came up with a few types of enterprise mobile apps that they consider to be mission-critical. These include:
- Sales Enablement
- Messaging and Collaboration
- Customer Relationship Management
- Customer Service and Support
In order to identify mission-critical apps, however, you’d have to look at your very own organization. You need to map out the fields which need improvement and focus on those which tend to yield the most benefit.
First things first, you can start by supplementing or replacing your existing core desktop applications with those which are geared toward mobile. Once you do this, you should expand appropriately to areas where mobile, as well as device-specific features, will be yielding competitive benefits and additional productivity.
Centralize The Management of Your App
Creating a centralized, unified dashboard can be the perfect way to get through emerging obstacles quickly and effectively. Undertaking a rather holistic approach will enable you to identify traffic patterns which could include usage errors, security anomalies, and whatnot.
As part of your strategy, you’d have to consider establishing a core team which will oversee the top concerns. Some of these challenges include:
- Lack of customization within the app
- Security
- Errors caused by updates
Understand The View of Your Organization
Tapping deeper into Adobe’s survey, the results suggested that employees who use enterprise mobile apps tend to feel up to date, productive, and empowered.
However, that’s not always the case. The efficient adoption of new technology can be complex and it could also cause feelings of distraction, helplessness, and confusion. Therefore, it’s critical to keep constant communication within the organization itself.
Rallying your teams around the deployment of enterprise mobile apps aimed at ensuring employee satisfaction will help to reach an internal consensus, which is invaluable.
Deploy Critical Capabilities Needed For Success
A key step towards accomplishing this is to shake off all mobile app development myths circling around. By doing so, you’d be able to determine the features which will yield the best results for your brand and deploy them for success.
According to the above study, 48% of the respondents actually name security as a top priority. And there are plenty of good reasons for that. Right off the bat, mobile devices are always on the go and a lot of them contain proprietary or confidential information that shouldn’t get into the wrong hands.
Another thing to consider is the integration with other business systems. The value of your enterprise mobile app isn’t only in displaying content, but also in its easy integration which allows employees to actually do something with that content.
Make Sure Your App Is ‘Future-Proof’
By now you’ve probably understood that the pace of change is rapid. Hence, future-proofing your enterprise mobile app is absolutely essential as far as your competitive strategy goes. Stay informed on privacy and security safeguards, emerging technologies which can improve overall user experience, and always strive to implement features which are of aid to your organization.
These could include:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Effective Collaboration Tools
In order to stay ahead of your time, it’s also important to look at what you’ve already done. How are your current apps designed to be used? What are their existing workflows? How can the become better?
Conclusion
Enterprise mobile app development is no news. A lot of the companies out there are already all over it. However, few are those who leverage the power of a proper and robust strategy.
The above are just a few of the tips you can take advantage of in order to give yourself a nice push forward. Staying constantly informed, however, is what can really get you ahead of the game.
