The emergence of on-demand business represents an unprecedented paradigm shift, akin to the proliferation of the internet in the 90’s. The manner in which commerce is done has completely transformed in the last decade or so. Consequently, consumer behaviour too has entered a completely unfamiliar space. With instant access to an increasing number of smartphones, apps, emails and all sorts of digital media, the consumer has grown accustomed to a sense of instant entitlement. As Steve Schlafman of RRE puts it, “Welcome to uberfication of our service economy”.

This sense of entitlement for services, optimum efficiency and convenience represents a veritable challenge for businesses to keep up. It comes as no surprise then, that so many industries have seen both periods of hyper-growth and vertical disruption – ground transportation, grocery, food delivery, healthcare are prime examples in this regard. There are some who have benefited from this change and others who have failed to stay afloat. The discerning criterion has unequivocally been a business’s ability to continually engage its customers and meet their changing demands.

Put succinctly, the challenge for entrepreneurs is to meet customers’ increasing sense of instant entitlement, while retaining cost-effective, scalable and efficient business operations. The perfect combination is precision-perfect planning and organization in the backend, and a sense of effortless convenience in the front-end for the customer. Easier said than done! However, it is becoming more and more evident, that harnessing the proliferating usage of mobiles is the ideal way to do this! There are many reasons for this – simplicity of use, widespread reach, direct communication, etc.

Customer Mobile Apps – The Competitive Advantage

The feasibility of success in the on-demand space warrants capturing mobile-based consumer experience and mobilising digital assets. People spend much more time on mobile apps than on website browsers. That means more productivity if your strategy is equipped to target those steadily increasing mobile screens.

Customer Mobile Apps are indispensable tools to scale-up, provide value to customers, manage orders, ensure customer loyalty, maintain mobile communication and optimize overall efficiency. Young businesses these days cannot afford aggregation services at the expense of sharing profits with them. A beneficial alternative is scaling-up one’s business by developing a native customer-app, through which businesses can reach a much wider audience and enter the on-demand space with a ready product.

Customer Apps are not only beneficial for businesses. They are also the preferred mode of operation for consumers. The process of downloading and using a customer app is easy and convenient. The learning curve is almost non-existent. Ordering goods and services or booking appointments through mobile platforms is the new age modus operandi. The days when customers used to order manually are long gone! More and more people identify mobiles as their primary device. One-touch instant gratification is no longer a luxurious want for tomorrow, but a very real need of today. To harvest the potential of mobile penetration, you have to mobilize some of your business processes.

That is why so many businesses across industries are recognizing the importance of mobile strategies, and are thus mobilizing their assets.

What Customer Apps Do for Businesses

Order Capturing & Management: To begin with, customer apps become the major source of capturing orders. Alongside increasing popularity, the volume of orders is likely to grow. Maintaining manual databases of orders is a wasteful activity – both in terms of time and money costs. A sophisticated customer app can streamline incoming orders and manage tasks much more efficiently. Moreover, if integrated with a sophisticated digital management system in the backend, it can even compute data to automate order assignment.

Branding: Every business spends a substantial amount of their budget on conveying a desirable brand image to its target market. There are innumerable strategies that have been employed to convey brand image – distributing stationary, sponsoring events, adverts and so on. The mobile screen has drastically altered strategies of branding. With your own dedicated app, building and conveying your brand image to the desired target audience has become easier than ever.

Customer Loyalty: Maintaining a continuous and lasting relationship with your customers is important. Ensuring customer loyalty is all about providing value to your customers. One way to do this is to offer customer loyalty programs, like many businesses already do. A consumer is much more likely to commit to your brand if there is reciprocation from your end.

Furthermore, a customer app enables you to glean insights about customer usage, preferences and frequency.

Automated Communication: Through a mobile platform, you can automate important reminders and notifications about your services, use geo-fencing to promote your services to a desired target audience and always have a direct link with your customers.

Increase Sales: Alongside increasing customer satisfaction, increased branding and communicative presence and an irresistible product, a mobile app is likely to boost your sales manifold! The mobile app is indispensable in reaching out to new customers, developing direct relationships with existing ones and promote new products. All these were once challenges in themselves, but have been mitigated well by mobile platforms. Clearly, there is a huge opportunity cost associated with missing out on the growing number of mobile screens and mobile apps which make it easier for customers to make purchases.

Go Mobile for Overall Efficiency

Mobile Screens are ubiquitous in today’s world. That much should be evident by the flurry of interest in digital marketing and advertising recently. However, it is not just the advantage of visibility and numbers that mobile apps offer businesses. It is the long term strategy in the times when customer experience and convenience are the biggest differentiating factor for your business service.

With its vision of enabling customers the benefits of going mobile to customers, Tookan has now come up with customer app for on demand businesses. Now businesses do not need to create their own customer app from scratch but can use our expertise and ready to use templates to design their business customer app in shortest amount of time. To get started visit us at Tookan.

If you haven’t already, mobilize your business processes. Because frankly, at a time when more people own mobile phones than do healthcare plans, you’re missing out!