5 Reasons Why App Based Offerings are Fueling the Entrepreneur Growth QuestApps are not mandatory for your business but it provides an edge to your enterprise and makes it easier for the customers to avail your services and thus helps you to scale
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
This is the era of "apps". Apps in the context of this article refer to the software's running on smartphones or watches or tablets. Most of us get our work done through these apps. Each city will have their local flavours embodied into the apps through language support, additional features and localized content.
But what sits behind these apps are the age-old standard services. Services could range from cabs, food delivery, parcelling, buying – selling goods, paying for utilities, financial services (banks, trading, etc.) or feature services required for a specific purpose.
As an entrepreneur who is wanting to start a service offering or high-end consulting service would need a physical presence in the yesterday years.
But that is no longer a mandatory requirement. The entrepreneur can focus on their core service offering and the delivery of these services can be channelized through apps.
Following are the top 5 reasons why app-based service offerings can inject nitrogen oxide (booster gas) to your growth quest:
Better User Experience.Imagin you as a consumer of a "cab" service have to wait outside the office or home and wave for a cab on a hot summer day. But now imagine, sitting on your cosy sofa, you are booking a cab (not to mention even picking the type of car) with known fare and getting down only when a cab has arrived. You know which one is a better experience. Similar is the experience when you avail services like home food delivery or any other. Also, you are not required to speak with anyone. You pick your service/choice of item from the catalogue, pay and even earn points. You can also look at various ratings before picking the service provider. Any standard service offering when abstracted by an app sitting on your mobile will ease and improve the interaction touchpoints. And with better user experience, you are able to retain the customer base and thus encouraging more business. And for the user, it's an awesome experience.
Increased Scalability.Apps provide your enterprise with an interface to expand beyond your physical reach. You can tab more customers by expanding your virtual reach. You can participate in various aggregated apps. With an interface that handles customer interactions (through chatbots), feedbacks (through BI), routing of complaints (rule-based workflows), auto-callback options & ease of payments your enterprise gets an unmatched edge to sustain and scale. If you were to do all of these through the physical presence of people or offices, you will hit the ceiling pretty soon. And that reduces the scope of scalability.
Improved Security & Trust.People are more comfortable paying for the service digitally than by cash. For pre-paid services, there's a peace of mind for the consumers. There's no physical handshake which increases the comfort and thus trusts. Most of the apps provide multi-model payment options and thus allowing the consumer to pay or get refunds with the utmost ease.
Increased Customer Base.和更好的用户体验、安全与服务offerings – it is very natural to retain your existing customer base but it also helps in free marketing. Also, as you start putting your offering among various aggregator apps, a whole new set of customers are exposed to the offerings. They look at the ratings, service offerings, compare the pricing, etc. and make a decision. Thereby, giving your enterprise exposure to a vast customer base beyond the hyperlocal geography. By providing optimized and subsidized pricing options or pay-back / points you are able to attract more customers through the apps. Cost-effectiveness that apps can drive is unmatched with the standard brick and mortar style of operations. And this thus helps in getting more customers.
Better Analytics & Prediction.As an entrepreneur, you would want to know what's happening with your business. Beyond the bottom and top line – you are also interested in understanding the pattern of service consumptions. With a unified channel (app), transactions around service offerings are digitally tracked. This helps in providing extensive slicing and dicing of data. With better analytics, you can not only retain your customer base but pro-actively address their concerns and improve the quality of services. Additionally, using the advanced machine learning / artificial intelligence you can also predict their behaviour and be prepared for market changes.
Apps are not mandatory for your business but it provides an edge
to your enterprise and makes it easier for the customers
to avail your services and thus helps you to scale.
App gives your business a shield which if utilized well can help your business to weather extreme changes in the market. It makes your enterprise more dynamic and leverages the digital channel more effectively.
