Applications are taking the business industry by storm, pushing businesses to create their own apps. There’s just one problem—business owners tend to forget that business and mobile apps are not one and the same.
Although they carry similarities, there are concrete differences between the two. More precisely, if a mobile app tends to customers, a business app caters to the business itself, particularly the employees. Consequently, mobile apps improve customer engagement while business apps improve operational efficiency—but what is operational efficiency?
What Is Operational Efficiency?
Operational efficiency isn’t something you’ll hear from just about anyone. Just think of it as the ratio between your gains and expenses. For instance, it can represent the ratio between time spent in finishing a business operation, and the benefits resulting from that operation. If the ratio increases, that denotes an improvement in operational efficiency.
For example, writing an article takes your employees six hours, and this article usually increases your website’s visitors by 50. Suppose you train your employees, and as a result, they can now create an article within half of what it originally took—three hours.
Despite that, the article still increases visitors by 50. This basically means that there’s an improvement in operational efficiency. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to improve this business aspect, except through investing in business apps. So how do business apps improve operational efficiency?
- Most Repetitive Tasks Are Automatable
Within a business operation, there will always be repetitive or recurring tasks. Sending emails, responding to inquiries, managing the payroll—these are some examples of tasks you have to perform repeatedly every single day. They’re not exactly the most important tasks, but they are necessary.
The bad news is, at the end of the day, you’ve done these tasks countless times and took a huge portion of your time. Whether you like it or not, you’re actually wasting time doing tasks you can accomplish more effortlessly with the right tools, and what are these tools?
Considering how they’re already everywhere, you may have heard of automation tools before. As the name suggests, these are tools that can complete tasks automatically. Although you can’t automate all business operations, it’s possible to at least eliminate time-consuming tasks, like the previous examples.
Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to use automation tools for complex business operations, and that’s where business apps come in.
Business apps have many benefits, and one of which is the fact that you can integrate automation tools into these apps. Doing so will allow you to enjoy the benefits of automation at your fingertips. The best part is that you can do it easily with companies like Easy Agile. These companies can deliver the best automation programs and solutions for your business.
- Distribute Data Among Business Personnel
You should know very well how important information dissemination is to a business. If there’s no reliable system that distributes data to your employees, they’re likely to commit mistakes. Unfortunately, as you continue growing your business, there will come a time when distributing information won’t be as simple as before.
As you take in more employees, you’ll have to bear the responsibility of storing their information. The same goes for your customers, or at least prospects. You’ll also have to handle company files, which will inevitably increase as your business matures.
As such, you’ll have to look for ways to store and distribute information quickly among your personnel. Below are a few scenarios where a business app can help with information distribution:
- Announcements
If there’s a recent change within your business operations, you’ll have to inform your employees as soon as possible. While you can always announce it through chats, remember that not everyone frequents their inbox. Business apps can serve as an additional channel to ensure everyone reads the necessary announcements.
- Company Metrics
Sales revenue, gross margin, Net Promoter Score, cost per customer acquisition—these are just a few examples of real-time data that prove to be essential in developing foolproof strategies. Using a sample KPI library can assure you are measuring the right metrics and your performance management has the best results. By making use of tracking plugins, it’s possible to display company metrics on your business apps.
- Internal Customer Service
Similar to teaching them the appropriate manner of answering the customers’ concerns, you must also ensure that your employees know how business operations work. For that, you’ll need to develop an internal customer service system. Basically, it’s a system similar to the customer service everyone’s familiar with, except that it caters to employees rather than the customers.
The beauty of internal customer service is its ability to eliminate misunderstandings that your employees may have. If mobile apps specialize in external customer service, business apps specialize in internal customer service.
With a smoother distribution of information, businesses can reduce downtime as much as possible, resulting in a massive increase in operational efficiency.
- Develop A Reliable Incentive Program
Incentive programs are schemes designed to attract and retain customers, but it’s not always about your customers. When managing a business, it’s also a good idea to maintain your employees’ loyalty and trust. Naturally, if an employee enjoys working with you, their efficiency is most likely to increase, and if their efficiency improves, it will reflect on the business. The question is—what does that have to do with business apps?
To begin with, creating an incentive program doesn’t mean you have to provide incentives to all your employees. If that’s your plan, you’re likely to exhaust your budget before seeing any considerable results. Instead, you have to focus on those who are doing better than everyone else, but to do that, you have to monitor each employee’s performance.
You can do this by looking at the Key Performance Indicator (KPI). KPI measures how well an employee is doing in a particular activity.
Suppose an employee has a high KPI, this likely means they’re showing better results than others. Alas, monitoring the KPIs of each individual can be difficult if you were to rely only on your current systems, and that’s why you need a business app.
Similar to how business apps can track real-time metrics, you can also do the same for your employees’ KPIs, given that it has a built-in tracking feature. As a result, it would become possible to develop incentive programs such as:
- Awards
- Retention bonus
- Project bonus
Take note that although they are useful, these techniques don’t yield success 100% of the time, so you might want to watch your expenditures to make sure they don’t exceed your budget.
Final Words
While business apps are indeed beneficial, this doesn’t mean that creating or choosing any app can improve your operational efficiency. It’s also crucial to look for the right people to develop your business app. And to do that, you’ll have to look for skillful developers. The right app can also improve other aspects of your business aside from its operational efficiency.
