The UK’s workforce is currently the least productive of all the G7 economies at 20% below the average. Further research has shown that the average person in a large enterprise can spend up to 2 days per week completing inefficient admin tasks that are not associated with the actual job they are paid for. For sales staff, this can mean time spent away from what they do best: selling. Smarter and more efficient working can help them meet targets by improving conversion rates and freeing up more time for valuable activities.
Today’s employees want simple, bite-sized enterprise applications that help them complete a task quickly, particularly as they have more responsibilities than ever before. Currently enterprise applications and workflows are built in a way that buries the individual tasks deep within thousands of other small processes, inside a complex system. The underlying processes are often good but the actual tasks can take far too long, resulting in wasted time for staff and a lack of agility.
Elevating the individual processes out of the system and turning them into simple and user-friendly micro-apps is a quick and easy way to improve productivity. Micro-apps are built using the underlying infrastructure and process, but with no coding, and for a mobile environment. Each micro-app is built with a single specific outcome in mind, enabling employees to complete more tasks, often in less than a minute. The result is a catalogue or library of ‘task based apps’ that automate the underlying business processes that are simple to use yet smart because now users can set personal KPI’s and alerts to remind or trigger activities whilst on the move. This can be critical for sales staff who are often on the road at customer or client meetings. Essentially, mobile apps can provide sales staff with a personal, quick, anytime, anywhere solution.
By unleashing the power of micro-apps, organisations can get the best from their existing applications, such as CRM software, to then suit the individual needs of all sales staff. This may be for employees’ on-the-move who need to access systems and information as quickly as possible, or for sales staff in the office who need the core processes to be speedy and straightforward so that they can get on with their core tasks.
Simplifying processes is, for some, a matter of survival. Particularly if you are in a sales team that has high targets and on a commission based salary. For example, employees looking to offer a quote to a new or existing customer, want to do so quickly and simply, through as few screens and processes as possible. Integrating micro-apps that work in tandem with sales and CRM software allows users to complete a task in as little as a minute, therefore enabling them to pull a quote quickly and move onto the next customer.
Implementing such bite-sized apps is a straightforward process. Constructed from an enterprise’s existing platforms, micro-apps can be built in a fraction of the time of a typical application, often in under a week and without the need for coding, with immediate deployment via the cloud. Micro-apps work on any device and co-exist alongside the existing infrastructure as back-end systems remain in place.
Micro-apps give employees the one thing they now expect – simple personalised business apps, in the palm of their hand that is also focused on the business need to optimise productivity. The result? A smarter, happier and more productive sales team. By simplifying and mobilising workflows, businesses can help their sales teams conduct greater customer activities via mobile devices, empower staff to respond to customer needs in real-time, manage customer data in a user-friendly interface for one unified view, and modernise all systems cost-effectively by using existing IT resources.
By Russell Acton, VP and General Manager, International at Capriza. Russell is responsible for running International Business and has held various leadership positions over the last 25 years in high-tech industries and brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of building high growth software businesses.
