How can you really know if an app is right for you and your company?
Q&A with Robert Wright, Senior Website & App Developer at Veugeler Design Group
Q: Do you think that all companies can benefit from having an app?
A: Not necessarily, it really depends on the industry and on what you are trying to achieve.
Q: So, as a business owner, what are some of the questions I could ask myself in determining whether or not I need an app?
A: Ask yourself: how technology can ease the friction of things that you’re doing day to day? How can I automate certain sectors of my business and what processes can be improved? Take for example a mid-size company with an HR department – maybe they could use an app to streamline time-off requests, formal complaints, voting for employee of the month, etc. It’s all about making the processes more streamlined and removing user/human error.
Q: Okay, I want an app, what are the first steps?
A: The first step is definitely defining your objective. What problem is this going to solve and how will it help your end user? From there, we will figure out what specific data points and content we will need to populate into the wireframe
Q: You’ve been a website developer for a long time. Is this similar to building websites?
A: This is a good one, because five years ago it was a completely different language in terms of coding. But, now we can use Javascript and HTML, which is what we use every day to build websites so they have helped developers overcome that hurdle.
Q: How do I know if an app is going to be a good return on investment?
A: Think about the man-power and the time invested in your marketing efforts. Let’s take a restaurant loyalty program for example. Back in the day you used to have to collect data from your customers and manually enter all that information, but an app automates the system and gathers all of that valuable information for you. The day and age of customer punch cards are gone. Why would you even do that when you aren’t collecting any customer data from that? Build a customer retention or customer loyalty app instead. Another example could be managing a fleet – you’ve got a team of truck drivers out there or you have a sales team on the road and you want to be able to see where they are at any given time and communicate with them in real-time, well that is possible through an app. At the end of the day, it’s all about making your life better and easier, so yes, I’d say in most cases it has great ROI.
Q: You built the Suwanee Beer Fest app for this year’s event…which was great, by the way. Tell us about your favorite features of that app.
A: The coolest thing for me was tracking the real-time voting for the Brew Battle, seeing votes go up and down in real-time and seeing how many people were participating.
Q: What was the end goal with the Suwanee Beer Fest app?
A: To improve the customer experience. We thought about what we wanted from an attendee perspective and that was the ability to rate and save the beers you try when there are hundreds in front of you at the festival. I know from my own beer festival experiences that it is hard to remember what beers you liked best, so to be able to save them to my profile and go back to review them later was huge for me.
For more information about improving customer engagement and loyalty by building an app for your business, contact Veugeler Design Group
678.482.2270
