If your business is struggling to remain competitive, a mobile app can provide considerable leverage. Mobile apps improve the shopping experience of customers, while helping them remain connected to your company. Yet, designing an app is tricky, and many businesses don’t know where to begin innovating an initial concept. Allowing the customer to design the app for you can improve the success of the app by ensuring that it’s built around the preferences of the users.
By understanding how people shop, you can build apps that fit their needs.
Analyse Your Customer Data
Before brainstorming app ideas, you should begin by analysing customer data to identify trends among shoppers. Your customer data will help you to get a better idea of who your customers are, what interests them, and what is driving your sales. You can use this information to gain insight into the types of apps that will be the most widely used among your clientele.
Think About the Biggest Problems Your Company Faces
Once you’ve tracked the trends of your shoppers, you can begin brainstorming apps that will solve some of your biggest problems your company faces, while maximising the business’s most prominent trends. If the data shows that more customers are visiting your website than your store, you could create apps that offer incentives and promotions for in-store products. If the data reveals that customers are relying regularly on your customer service department, you could create an app that streamlines communication between the business and the customer. Create a core group of initial ideas based around the biggest trends you identify within the data.
Take Polls to Gauge the Needs of Your Shoppers
If you want to know what your customers want, all you have to do is ask. Email questionnaires to your most active customers and encourage their feedback about your company. Questionnaires can be used to gauge overall customer satisfaction, learn about the pros and cons of their shopping experience, learn how customer service practices are perceived among customers, and other critical business insights.
Your customers can identify weaknesses that mobile apps can help improve.
You can use the results from questionnaires to identify the areas of your business that might benefit most from an app. If the majority of customers are reporting favourable customer service experiences, but complaining of long lines in your store, you can create an app that streamlines the checkout process or allows customers to prepay for products online.
Design the Interface Based on Aggregate Trends
No matter how useful the app may be, if the layout is confusing and frustrating to use, it will perform poorly. Conduct ample market research into the psychology of customers, and optimise your layout based on what’s most intuitive to the user.
Release a Beta App
The goal is customer satisfaction, so you should assess the satisfaction of customers before releasing the final app. Release a beta app among a select group of your most dedicated customers. Create a detailed questionnaire that gauges their satisfaction of the overall performance and functionality of the app. After the customers have had the opportunity to test the app themselves, they can provide feedback regarding anything they didn’t like, allowing you to tweak it prior to its official release.
The whole purpose of designing a business app is to improve the satisfaction and shopping experience of your customers. In order to ensure the app is a success, it needs to be designed with customer preferences in mind. By allowing the customer to design the app for you, you can ensure it provides the functions your users want most, while utilising an interface that’s intuitive and easy to use. Design the perfect business app with the help of an expert app development platform. Contact us today to learn more.
