Can Micro App Strategy Be The Silver Bullet For Your Business?

1 year, 3 month ago by Timothy Cox

If you too are heading with the pack mentality towards mobility solutions without a robust strategy, you are doomed. This blog busts the common myths that project mobile app as the next best thing for your business. What you need is more than just a run-of-the-mill solution – interestingly, we have a solution. Read this blog to find out!

If you too are heading with the pack mentality towards mobility solutions without a robust strategy, you are doomed. This blog busts the common myths that project mobile app as the next best thing for your business. What you need is more than just a run-of-the-mill solution – interestingly, we have a solution. Read this blog to find out!

The Mobile App Saga

There are no two opinions about the fact that smartphone users have been growing by leaps and bounds. According to a report from Statista, there will be over 2.87 billion smartphone users by 2020.

The lifeblood of smartphones are applications – one cannot mention apps and mobiles in two different breaths. Apps are significant as they drive the user engagement to a large extent these days.

Can you guess the number of applications that are downloaded every year? That’s 179 billion!

Are you looking for the best no-code platform for application development?

Mobile Apps for Businesses

Why are these numbers significant though?

These numbers and other similar statistics have compelled enterprises to make the most crucial of the business decisions. Enterprises thought of moving beyond user engagement and arrived at a new level.

What if we could boost organizational efficiency and productivity through mobile apps?

Every organization, regardless of its size, is running behind the mantra ‘Develop an app to improve performance.’

Enterprises have been focusing on building apps that can help them improve employee efficiency and boost productivity.

But wait, there’s more to it.

According to a TechCrunch 1 in 4 people abandon the mobile app right after the first use.

Another study on similar lines claimed that an average app loses 90% of its daily mobile users in just 30 days of installation.

There are more startling numbers that show that mobile apps may not be the Holy Grail after all.

Is it worth the candle after all?

So, is it really possible to have a mobile application for a business that shoots up productivity and reduces costs?

There’s no denying that mobile apps can vastly improve the productivity of the field employees and ultimately improve the profitability of the businesses.

However, it should also be taken note of that building such apps is no cakewalk, to put it mildly.

It is a tedious, long, and often frustrating process for both the businesses and the developers. Millions of dollars go down the drain every year thanks to the failed projects given their high rate of failure.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that many companies don’t even attempt to tread the mobile app path due to forbidding costs and time requirements.

It’s better for them to run inefficiently than run the risk of losing loads of cash and put an additional burden on a company.

The Shaping up of Enterprise-level apps

According to a report published by Enterprise Mobility Exchange, most of the enterprises are investing in the apps to boost the productivity of the employees. Here are the top reasons cited for the investment in mobile apps:

1. Increased Productivity – 74.6%

2. Improved Customer Service – 63.8%

3. Improved Operational Efficiency – 60.8%

4. Reduce Costs/Overheads – 39.2

(The numbers indicate the percentage of respondents marking that particular reason/option.)

But there are certain challenges that come along with enterprise mobility. It is not

Integrating apps with the current legacy systems – 47.7%
Getting stakeholder buy-in – 38.5%
Change management – 38.5%
Budget limitations – 33.1%

It is also interesting to note that enterprises were even ready to allocate a budget of $250,000 – $500,000 for an app, which takes 12-18 months to launch.

The logical questions that arise are:can your business allocate this kind of money? Can you afford to spend time on a project that comes along with its own risk?

Introducing The Micro App

Instead of having a mobile app that costs a bomb and takes so long to be developed, it’s better to go for a micro app.

As against micro app, the normal mobile app has too many functions and remain underutilized or unutilized, a micro app is a small package designed to solve a specific problem for a business.

A micro app is a mobile app which serves one small part of an organization and solves one problem at a time. The traditional approach to building mobile apps for employee productivity has failed.

The key design aspects of the micro apps are simplicity, frequent changes, and lesser time to release updates/versions/features.

Businesses change faster and traditional approaches cannot catch up with today’s speed.

The micro app strategy is about quickly moving from concept to business insights. By the time a traditional app is built, enterprises already have undergone changes and rebuilding these apps can be a nightmare.

(You can read here about why custom-build apps are better than off-shelf software or apps built by 3rd party developers)

What is a Micro App Strategy & Why is it Important to Your Business?

Rather than building a large monolithic mobile app, a micro app strategy promotes building simple and smaller or micro apps that allows business agility in small and big organizations equally.

Foundational Principles of the Micro App Strategy:

Keep it simple – focus on solving one problem
Build apps faster (use code-less tools)
Change even faster to adapt (businesses change faster)
Faster business insights for decision-making

Sticking to the above principles help enterprises mobilize the existing software and the data

The Micro App Flow = Build -> Capture -> Learn

A micro app comprises of mobile apps that can run on different platforms like iOS/Android. Platforms like Axonator also offer analytics dashboard for business insights based on the collected data.

Micro Apps are much more than a mobile form: Apps + Workflows + Business Insights

Embracing the Micro App Strategy with Axonator

We have already seen that developing an enterprise-level app may cost a fortune and takes months to launch.

What if you could have an app for your business that costs way lesser and can be developed in weeks?

An app that perfectly fits your needs, integrates with your system, boosts productivity manifold and reduces your costs!

All of these possibilities and a lot more hold true with Axonator!

Axonator is the world’s first platform that provides its users with tools and support to implement the micro app strategy.

Axonator has introduced a totally new approach to enterprise mobility:

It is the world’s most advanced mobile forms app builder. It supports the most simple mobile forms to the advanced apps, which can be used as mini-IT systems.

Eco Pride Inc, implemented the micro app strategy with Axonator and could increase the business profit by $180,000 a year. Not just cost savings, they were also able to avoid the frequent audit report delay (brought down to 0% from 43%). This improved the customer satisfaction levels of Eco Pride Inc.

Axonator’s unique mobile-first approach means that the apps can be built using drag and drop user interface. No coding at all.

It will automatically generate and publish the mobile app to the Android and the iOS platforms.

With Axonator, businesses of any size can easily automate their field activities using forms instead of papers.

Axonator not only captures data and store on the cloud but allows you to take action on data like sending the data to an email or salesforce or any system that you already use automatically.

Workflows allow users to automate using a set of customizable steps. Automation includes sending data to various places like Google Drive, SAP, Maximo, Salesforce and Zapier.

It can be exported to a PDF or spreadsheet. Your existing data can be imported into the app. A user can define a set of steps that are automatically executed when a form is filled and submitted.

Using Axonator, Viva Cafe could bring down costs by 82% in just 1 year. They could even sell 23% more franchises within a year, and their business profits grew by $200,000.

Conclusion

There’s a reason why Axonator’s micro app strategy becomes successful. At the beginning of the blog, we did talk about mobile apps being abandoned or uninstalled, remember?

The same’s not true with Axonator micro apps because these apps offer a great user experience. The user doesn’t feel overwhelmed to use these applications.

They engage them - that’s the whole point!

Simple apps are the ones that make your strategy successful, complicated apps overloaded with unnecessary features will die a slow death eventually.

Micro App Strategy can help your employees improve their efficiency and allow them to save time and efforts.

Your teams are more empowered with apps that ease their work and improve accuracy while collecting data.

Features such as sending out notifications, generating reports, tracking performance, auto-assigning of tasks, etc. can really bring automation to your enterprise that makes a lot of business sense.

Would you like to know how Axonator’s Micro App Strategy can help your Business to boost productivity, reduce costs, and grow profits?

Get in touch with us today at Support@axonator.com

For enterprises who are willing to introduce a digital transformation in their business, there’s a way they can do it without putting anything at stake – no huge money, time, effort, or a headache. Discover it here!