Category: SaaS

The world has changed, and it keeps on changing. We know live in a world where mobile devices and smartphones have become almost all-encompassing; we rely on them for far more than just basic communication – they have become the items around which our lives are organized, through which our thoughts and plans link up to the wider world, and wherein we record our daily existence, do our shopping, our banking, book our reservations, find love, and discover new forms of entertainment. Our mobile devices have intertwined with our lives in ways hitherto unimaginable… and believe us when we say that this is merely the beginning.

As such, even thinking for a moment that your business might not need an app is increasingly ridiculous. Businesses rely on their competitive nature, on staying one step ahead of the others, and gaining the edge over any others within their field. Not having an app for your business in 2020 is something which not only marks your business out as irrelevant in the modern, dynamic, and ever-evolving marketplace, it also cuts your business off from a wide range of advantages and opportunities which custom app development offers with ease.

While there are, frankly, dozens of different reasons why custom apps for business are more important and essential for business growth than ever before, we’re going to focus on just a small handful of justifications in this blog. By considering the points below, and thinking seriously about why business apps can open the doors for increased trade, heightened marketing reach, greater customer satisfaction and so very much more in 2020, it will become blatantly clear why your business really does need an app, and why a custom app for your business may just be the smartest move you make this year. Read on and find out for yourself!

Direct Customer Interaction

It seems like a million years ago that businesses would have distinct and impenetrable opening and closing hours, outside of which there could be no questions answered, no customer interaction, and no promotional efforts made. If business apps have achieved one thing, and can help your business in one way above all others, it’s in this sense of completely throwing open the doors of opportunity for heightening your communication with customers.

Whether this comes in the form of advanced AI chatbots, which allow you to answer customer questions and provide assistance through the wonder of artificial intelligence, or in the form of interactive blogs, link-ups to Twitter accounts, or a live chat feature (or indeed many other possibilities) the options are more or less endless. Customers are more demanding than ever before when it comes to their time and the level of service they receive, and believe us, your competitors will be more than happy to snap up customers who look – even for a moment – elsewhere. Business apps allow you to keep customers happy and in the loop… and happy customers spend more, and return again, and again, and again.

A Range of Features at Their Fingertips

While there’s little doubt about the fact that your website contains all the truly essential information your customers need to know about your business, it would be foolhardy to believe that this is the be-all-and-end-all of what your business requires.

After all, so very many online interactions and web searches nowadays take place on mobile devices, and your customers want to be able to access more than just the basics, and they’ll need to be able to do so on the go. With an app for your business, you can link up your website to your social media feeds. You’ll be able to add interactive maps. You’ll be able to turn those mobile devices into augmented reality marketing tools. You can bring mobile games into your app, turn phones into loyalty cards and voucher scanners. The possibilities are as broad as they are exciting!

Do I Need an App if I use Social Media Marketing?

In a word: yes. Don’t get us wrong: there’s no questioning the fact that social media marketing and social media feeds are fantastic tools for businesses of all types, linking your presence up to a truly global network, and helping your business to grow and establish itself on the marketplace. However, a custom business app can help complement your social media efforts, and can also achieve goals which social media cannot reach.

Why? Because a custom app for your business removes all the spam that comes with social media, and allows your customer base to have unfettered, uninterrupted access to everything your business does. Just think about it: when you put your messages out on Twitter or Instagram etc, those marketing messages and content needs to compete with millions upon millions of other items, and can easily get lost if the algorithms are not in your favor. An app will deal with this issue instantaneously, and it also gives you much more creative control regarding how your content comes across.

Take Email Marketing Further with Push Notifications

Push notifications are one of the most useful and effective aspects of a custom business app, as they allow your business to provide sharp, snappy, and efficient reminders and messages to your customer base, and keep engagement and interaction levels high.

Interestingly, this used to be the realm of more traditional email marketing, which many claim was effectively killed off by Google’s highly effective spam filters and ‘promotions’ folder. Be serious: when was the last time you looked through the emails in your promotions folder and gave the material there even the slightest hint of a second look? The chances are, this isn’t something you do often… if ever at all. Your customers will download your business app because they want to associate with your company, and they want to receive updates about what you do and will do in the future – push notifications bypass those spam filters and allow you to communicate your messages with ease.

Streamline Communications and Build Relationships with Business Apps

We’ve outlined just some of the key reasons why your business needs a mobile app, and why developing a custom app with a professional app development agency might just be the smartest move you make. The future is here, and through mobile apps, businesses are more capable than ever of keeping up with the increasing demands of an ever-growing consumer base, whose expectations and standards never stop growing higher.

Mobile apps not only place your business at the forefront of a quickly evolving market, they manage to do what businesses have been striving to do for generations: they deepen the relationship between customer and company, and personalize communication to an impressive and highly effective level. Add into this mix the efficiency of an app, the heightened marketing potential, and the progressive branding opportunities, and the reasons for developing a mobile app grow more convincing than ever before.

About the author

Though a lawyer by trade, Vasily Malyshev found his passion in the mobile tech, self-taught design and development. He is the founder of Messapps, one of the top New York app development companies. Today, in addition to working with Messapps, Vasily is also teaching app development and marketing at New York University and regularly invests in other tech startups.

Organizations are required to comply with an ever-increasing number of regulations. In the US, one of the most widely-reaching is the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, which applies to all public companies within the US.

The purpose of SOX is to ensure that investors in these public companies are protected against fraudulent activity. In order to achieve SOX compliance, an organization is required to maintain complete and transparent records of all of their financial dealings. The intention of the SOX Act is to ensure that scandals like Enron never happen again, where the company destroyed documents to prevent evidence from falling into the hands of the US Security and Exchanges Commission.

Under SOX, an organization is prohibited from destroying certain types of documents and required to retain them for a certain number of years. Each year, the organization’s CEO and CFO are required to provide a report on the company’s current financial status, and the penalties for inaccurate reporting are steep. As a result, an organization needs a high level of visibility into its financial data in order to generate correct reports for SOX.

Most Organizations Don’t Automate SOX Compliance

All public US companies are required to comply with SOX. However, the law does not specify how they have to perform the data collection and processing necessary to generate their reports. As a result, many organizations are taking a manual approach to data collection and report generation for SOX compliance. According to a recent survey, 47% of organizations are failing to take advantage of the numerous next-generation technologies that can help them to achieve and demonstrate compliance.

In the case of the SOX regulation, the main requirement is that an organization retains certain records for 5 years and ensures that they are not tampered with. Since this data collection and retention is often performed manually, organizations are missing the opportunity to decrease the overhead associated with maintaining compliance and are more likely to make reporting mistakes due to human error.

Benefits of Compliance Automation

The nearly half of organizations that are not taking advantage of opportunities to automate part or all of their SOX compliance activities are missing out on the wide range of benefits of automation. By moving work from manual processes to automated ones, an organization can decrease overhead and better manage their compliance.

• Increased Data Visibility

The SOX regulation requires an organization to have a high level of visibility into certain types of data in order to provide a certification that all of this data is correct. Manually trying to monitor and manage all of the potential stores of this data throughout the enterprise puts the organization’s compliance at risk since a simple oversight can result in important data being missed. With automated data collection and monitoring, an organization can be confident that they have full visibility into relevant sensitive data without requiring periodic searches through all of an organization’s network for hidden data repositories. This increased visibility is also valuable for ensuring that all sensitive or valuable data is properly secured.

• Lower Compliance Overhead and Costs

When organizations fail to embrace automation for regulatory compliance, this doesn’t remove their responsibility to maintain and demonstrate compliance. Instead, these organizations are forced to manually manage all compliance-related activities. For regulations in general and SOX in particular, compliance reports and the data that they require are fairly standardized. Paying employees to collect this data is much more expensive and time-consuming than automating data collection and just having a human check over the final numbers before sending off the report.

• Increased Productivity

The activities associated with regulatory compliance don’t earn the organization any money. The closest they come is to remove the need to pay fines for non-compliance. By freeing up human employees to perform core job roles, strategic automation of compliance activities can improve the productivity of the business and decreases the probability of human error in compliance reporting.

• Scalable Compliance

SOX is only one among many regulations that organizations must comply with. As the number of compliance regulations grows, attempting to manually maintain and demonstrate regulatory compliance quickly becomes unsustainable. Many of these new regulations are focused on sensitive data, either retaining it, as in the case of SOX, or protecting it, for GDPR and other data protection regulations. As a result, the same types of data are likely to be needed in multiple different compliance reports, and automating these data collection processes can allow an organization to maintain compliance with a growing number of new regulations and standards without needing significant growth in employee headcount.

Getting Started Automating Compliance

Almost half of the organizations are failing to take advantage of automation for SOX compliance. Like with many other regulations, SOX is focused on how an organization manages certain types of sensitive information. Compliance reporting requires an organization to gather a large amount of information about this data, and this process can be easily automated, providing a range of benefits to an organization.

One major way that an organization can lighten their compliance burden through automation is by adopting a solution that automatically identifies repositories of sensitive or protected data and provides centralized visibility, access monitoring, and vulnerability testing for them. With this type of solution in place, an organization can achieve the visibility needed for SOX compliance with much fewer manual processes, ensure that the data is properly protected, and lay the groundwork for compliance with other data protection regulations.