These days people have tons of apps on their phones. It’s not that difficult to get the initial download, what’s a lot harder is to get smartphone users to actively use the app and not delete it after a few days. How is this important for your business? If you create an app that will be used by either employees or customers on a daily basis, you will experience a number of benefits!

If we’re talking clients…

If you get your customers to install your app on their phones, you will have direct access to them every day. In fact, phones are the electronic devices that people spent the most time on.

On average, that’s 4 hours 30 minutes a day. Think of that time as the market. If you can get just 1% of the market share, you’ll have your customers spending almost 3 minutes on your app every day. If it’s 10% that would be 27 minutes. Now, those times are very different but they can both make a huge impact.

Now, there are two main ways to use this to your advantage. If your app creates value for the customer, they will voluntarily spend time on it every day.

This will create a very simple equation in their heads, which they won’t even notice: “this business” = good. Your customers will see that besides just selling them your product or service, you’re actually helping them in a way that’s independent of sales… at least in their eyes. Of course, you’ll be more likely to attract paying customers this way.

The other way, which by the way goes hand in hand with creating value, are notifications. This is more delicate than it might seem and depends a lot on the kind of business you’re running.

Do you service or sell cars? It might not be a great idea to send a notification about what’s on sale every day - that’s just annoying (unless the customer opts in voluntarily and NO we don’t mean an automatic tick on the first launch of the app).

However, having a feature that knows when all car-related check-ups are due and remind one of that let’s say a month before, two weeks before and a week in advance, could actually be really useful. Why? It creates value, everyone forgets about car checkups.

If we’re talking employees…

Even an internal app can help your company in many ways, sometimes even more than one for customers. The app doesn’t even have to be custom made, if we’re talking for example communications or task management. Apps like slack can be used on all platforms and can be modified in just about any way. Building on an already existing infrastructure can save a lot of time and money.

Sometimes Slack etc. just won’t do, so you might need a custom app. The advantage of internal apps is that you can really focus on functionality, but you can also make it look really good. Either way, if you do a good job, the very least you will achieve is higher productivity and your employees might even see it as a benefit.