Think about some of your most time-consuming tasks that are performed by many employees in your business. Wouldn’t it be great if you can automate those time consuming and repetitive tasks? Wouldn’t it also be great if those tasks and tools can be easily accessible by users located anywhere in the world? And have it tailored to the specific needs of your business? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then your business can benefit from a customized web application.
Customized web applications can transform the processes in which your employees and partners interact with your business. In the long run it can provide significant cost savings through improved efficiencies. Below are 5 key benefits we’ve gathered from our experience with scoping and building custom web applications for our clients.
- Competitive Advantage
- Automate Repetitive Tasks
- Specific Features and Functionalities
- Better User Experience
- Better Maintenance and Support
1. Competitive Advantage
When you’re using out of the box software, it’s likely that your competitors will be using the same tool. To maintain a competitive edge, it’s important for businesses to have more personalized in-house digital capabilities that will allow employees to be more agile. This is even more important now as most companies’ workforce are working remotely. Whether its specific features and functionality that can help you stand apart from your competitors, or enabling employees to use one platform which can be accessed remotely using a secure login and to be able to complete tasks more efficiently and quickly, a custom web app can help your employees work more efficiently and enable them to respond to customer needs more quickly.
To summarize, creating a custom web application gives you three main benefits for maintaining a competitive advantage:
- Customized workflows – Enable your employees to work more efficiently while building in standards and processes into your system.
- Accessibility – By taking advantage of the GCP infrastructure like GMP, customized web applications can be accessed worldwide.
- Security – With GC based IAM, your application is secure and only accessible to GSuite users of your organization. Furthermore, the site can be limited access based on region or IP, further preventing any external access.
2. Automate Repetitive Tasks
You can boost productivity and efficiency by having custom-built software that enables you to automate tasks, which are often done manually to save time and increase accuracy. This is especially useful when businesses are looking to deliver at a high impact with maximum capacity.
Examples include:
- In the digital marketing space, UTM parameters are important to track the performance of digital marketing campaigns. You may have a streamlined routine that consists of various spreadsheets that help you build campaign URLs. However, with a customized web application, your campaign URLs become more consistent, reliable, and provide you with the ability to seamlessly automate the campaign data to your Analytics and Advertising platforms.
- User automation of GMP platforms with GSuite is possible for automating centrally managed user permissions based on a GSuite login into common Google platforms, such as GA, DCM, etc. Manually editing user/properties has traditionally been a process costing hours of valuable resources. With an automated application, the tasks again become simple, consistent, and easily reviewable by a dedicated admin.
3. Specific Features and Functionalities
Most of our clients use applications that offer standard or out of the box features and/or functionalities. Unfortunately, oftentimes these tools will not have the capacity or the necessary functions or scalability you may need as your business continues to grow and change. Some of the common issues we’ve seen are as follows:
- Some applications may provide you with upgrade options where you may have to pay extra for a full suite of features when you only need 1 or 2 of those features.
- Some applications have a limit on the number of events or tasks that can run in an application’s scope within a specified time. This is because the application has a quota limit and when it exceeds the quota limit, all jobs running in the application scope can get canceled.
A customized web app can provide you with a great starting point where you have the features and functionality that are specific for your current business needs. It can also offer you the scalability and flexibility to change or add to your custom application to serve you for your anticipated business needs. Additionally, automated applications deployed into the cloud also address the tedious quota limits applied to users. At InfoTrust, we’ve used cloud infrastructure to address tedious quota limits applied to users by leveraging multiple service accounts, which will ensure that all events within the application can run at the same time, saving valuable time.
4. Better User Experience
Customized web applications can offer the design and functionality that is simple and intuitive to use, with a design based on customized use cases. Some of our clients use multiple platforms and tools to complete specific tasks. This could be, for example, whether they are providing specific platform access to groups of users, monitoring web and CRM data to make informed business decisions, or deploying online marketing campaigns and content for lead generation.
A custom web app can ensure that the app is tailor-made to reduce the time it takes to complete the tasks, by consolidating common tasks into a single UI. This will allow better integrations of multiple platforms and improve collaboration between users. This is accomplished by packaging the consolidated functionality neatly in a platform that has the look and feel of your brand, all hosted with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for global access while having the security infrastructure inherited from GCP.
5. Better Maintenance and Support
With a custom web application, you can decide the level of technical support you need based on your requirements and budgetary constraints. Standard (out of the box) software support usually provides limited support, can incur high costs to fix an issue, and takes a long time to fix. With a customized app, InfoTrust works with you to define expected SLAs for different types of support as well as the costs associated. Therefore, you’re ensured that your platform continues to run smoothly, changes are done according to your timeline – all to ensure your work processes continue and improve uninterrupted.
Overall, custom web applications can provide a competitive edge, improve employee productivity, increase governance, and cost management. I hope the benefits and experiences I’ve shared with you can help you on your discovery of building a customized app for your business.
