Month: June 2022

Enterprise app challenges

Automation is hard. Especially if you want to automate the processes of a large company that has existed since long before all these new technologies, trends, and possibilities emerged. Enterprise mobile app development is hard due to legacy systems, lengthy decision-making processes, and the need to train employees and make the new system work for all departments.

All these are serious challenges any mid-sized or large business has to overcome in order to profit from automation in the long-term perspective.

Automation in large companies is hard due to legacy systems, lengthy desicion-making process and the need to train employees

Currently, there are lots of off-the-shelf solutions on the market, and their number continues to grow. The enterprise mobile app market size is projected to grow to $259 billion by 2022, as more and more companies are automating their processes.

How to use an enterprise mobile app

For most businesses, automating their processes and interactions between departments, partners, and clients is inevitable. Companies that still rely on paperwork, endless Excel documents, and phone calls fall short. Modern enterprise mobile apps are able to cover any issue a company faces. Also, they make enterprise mobile app management easy, as the third-party is responsible for it.

Here are just a few examples of what enterprise software can help you with:

• Online payment processing
• Billing automation
• Security
• Customer relationship management
• Business process management
• Resource planning
• HR management
• Project management
• Form automation
• External enterprise app integration
• Collaboration

In this article, we’ll talk about the 10 best enterprise apps that will help you optimize your operations and make your employees more productive.

Also, we’ll briefly talk about what to do if no off-the-shelf solutions are able to cover your needs. Each company is unique and using commercially available apps sometimes results in too much compromise. If you find this to be the case, you might consider mobile app development for enterprises. To make it easier and faster, look into mobile enterprise application platforms, or MEAPs.

Best enterprise mobile apps for businesses in 2023

Are you finding that standard enterprise business apps don’t live up to your expectations? Here’s a list of enterprise mobile app examples that were built with corporate needs in mind, from collaboration and human resources to marketing automation and expense management.

1. NetSuite OneWorld

NetSuite OneWorld from Oracle is one of the best enterprise mobile apps for resource planning for enterprises that helps you to:

• Track expenses
• Create reports
• Use business dashboards
• Manage security records

This application is great for managers who are always on the go, as it has everything you need for planning resources in one place.

Pricing: Though Oracle doesn’t disclose their pricing for NetSuite OneWorld, third-party websites suggest that the price starts at $999 per month and goes up by an additional $99 for each user. Oracle determines the price for each client according to their needs, deployment size, and number of users.

2. Expensify

Expensify is the best aid for your account manager. This advanced accounting platform allows you to manage receipts, track your expenses, and optimize them at the same time.

With Expensify, you can just scan your receipts and have all the information filled into an expense report automatically. This saves lots of time for accountants.

Another useful feature is card management: see all your corporate cards, purchases, and ghost cards to see where the money is going in your company in real-time. You can also track other expenses by integrating different types of software, travel tools, and apps like Uber and Lyft to keep all your expenses in one place.

Expensify offers a bunch of products for these domains:

• Accounting
• Education
• Health and wellness
• Food and beverage
• Media and entertainment
• Nonprofits
• Retail
• Sports
• Startups

Pricing: The price for corporations starts at just $5 per month per user; however, for this, you should have an Expensify card (which is free). If you don’t have one, you’ll need to pay an unbundled fee.

3. ClickMeeting

ClickMeeting is a platform for webinars, and it helps all members of large organizations stay in tune. ClickMeeting allows users to do product demos, organize online courses and training sessions, hold online meetings and large online events, and collaborate.

ClickMeeting has all the features you need for productive online communication:

• Webinar rooms
• Custom branding
• Screen sharing
• Webinar statistics
• Webinar recording
• Tests and surveys
• Web conferencing

Pricing: ClickMeeting offers a free 30-day trial and then provides options at $25 and $40 per month for webinars. The enterprise plan (for a custom fee) includes everything a company may need from a webinar platform.

4. SurveyMonkey

To run a company effectively, you need to know all the ins and outs of your processes in every single department. You also need to know what your customers or clients think of your company to identify opportunities to improve.

SurveyMonkey allows you to easily conduct surveys and get all the results in one place. With the help of SurveyMonkey, company owners can learn about:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Opinions on events

HR managers can use SurveyMonkey to evaluate:

• Employee engagement
• Job satisfaction

If you want to scale your business, you should first conduct market research, concept testing, and opinion polls.
Pricing: SurveyMonkey starts at $22 per month for one user. A premium subscription is $99 per month.

6. HappyFox

Outstanding service is a must for any company that wants to stay relevant. HappyFox is a customer support product that helps you manage support requests fast: a crucial ability in a world where nobody’s ready to wait for hours.

HappyFox allows you to keep all support requests in one place, create reports on your support team’s performance, build new workflows, and customize fields for the best support experience.

HappyFox can automate your customer support with the help of smart rules and automatic assignments, giving tasks to employees according to their workloads. With ticket templates and a task management system, problem-solving becomes as fast as it can be.

Pricing: HappyFox offers a free trial, and pricing starts at $29 per month per user.

7. MailChimp

If you do email marketing in your company, you probably either already use MailChimp or have at least heard of it. MailChimp is one of the most popular marketing platforms in the world. While this product used to be just about email marketing, it’s now a full-fledged marketing platform that allows you to conduct marketing campaigns via:

• Email
• Social media
• Landing pages
• Shoppable landing pages
• Digital ads
• Postcards
• Automations
• Transactional emails

MailChimp also offers an advanced CRM and an audience dashboard that can help you create highly personalized campaigns based on your clients’ behavior.

MailChimp can help you segment your audience according to different parameters, from their demographics to tags you put on each of your clients according to their preferences.

Pricing: There’s a free version of MailChimp, but it’s too limited for enterprises. Paid plans cost $10, $15 and $300 a month. The most advanced plan includes everything you need to do advanced segmentation and get the most out of your marketing campaigns.

8. Salesforce Sales Cloud Professional

Salesforce is probably the biggest business platform you can imagine. It has tools for everything from sales to customer support, and it’s easy to get lost in the products and services it offers.

Sales Cloud Professional is one of them. With it, you can manage your whole sales team more efficiently than ever. Here are just some of its features:

• CRM
• Customizable reports and analytics
• Sales console
• Lead routing and assignment
• Web-to-lead capture
• Calendar
• Price books and catalogs
• Forecasting
• Email targeting and follow-ups
• Live chat
• Work order management
• Cloud files for collaboration
• Roles and permissions
• Sandbox
• API for connecting to any app

To that, you also get support from the Salesforce team, and for additional capabilities, you can subscribe to add-ons.

Pricing: SalesForce pricing starts at $25 per month and reaches $329 per month for all the features you can need for a large enterprise.

9. BambooHR

BambooHR is a human resource platform that makes each step of the requirements and employee lifecycle easier. It offers personal data analytics and gathers information about each employee in a simple and intuitive dashboard.

BambooHR helps you with these everyday tasks:

• Updating employee information in each document
• Performance tracking
• Providing and gathering feedback
• Setting goals
• Communicating during the hiring process
• Collaborating on hiring
• Sending job offers
• Employee onboarding
• Managing time off

Pricing: BambooHR starts at $6.19 per employee per month for the Essentials package and $8.25 per employee per month for the Advantage package.

10. HootSuite

The last enterprise application on our list is HootSuite, a great tool for social media marketing. If a large part of your brand voice comes from social media, you definitely need a tool to manage all the social media platforms you’re active on.

The HootSuite mobile app allows you to manage your social media content by scheduling and publishing it. Instead of using separate social media platforms, HootSuite puts all your profiles in one place.

HootSuite allows your SMM manager to:

• Publish content to many social networks from one app
• Monitor conversations and mentions
• Share images, videos, and GIFs
• Set up content streams
• Track user engagement
• Use social analytics
• Set up and track organic and paid ad campaigns

Pricing: HootSuite bundles start at $29 per month, allowing one user to manage up to 10 social media accounts. A business plan costs $599 per month, allowing 5+ users to manage up to 35 accounts. An enterprise solution can allow even more than that, but the price will be determined individually.

What about custom enterprise app development?

Enterprise mobile app strategy is hard to develop, but once you do it, everything falls into place, as each feature of your solution starts to correspond to your day-to-day tasks.

Despite there being hundreds of great tools for enterprises, some large companies still choose to build an enterprise mobile app themselves. Why is that?

Well, there can be several reasons:

• Customization issues
• Monthly fees
• Security

Let’s talk about them in detail.

Customization

No matter how customizable a service is, it may still miss some processes that are crucial for your company, and management will need to come up with another solution — for example, using another tool to fill the gap. This may be quite inconvenient.

Moreover, you can’t change the enterprise mobile app architecture, and this may be a problem, if your current solutions don’t fit the .

Monthly fees

Surely, developing large enterprise software isn’t cheap. But paying thousands of dollars a year for many years to another company can become economically unprofitable, especially if you pay for some features you don’t need.

By outsourcing development and using platforms for enterprise development, you can significantly cut down the development costs and then only spend money for maintenance.

Security

Not every company is particularly fond of the idea that all its data is stored on third-party servers and is basically available to another company.

For example, one of our clients is a large company that needs more security that any third-party communication platform can offer. We’re currently developing a secure messenger for their internal use that encrypts all communications, documentation, and files and stores them on the company’s own servers.

Final thoughts

It’s hard to imagine a modern company that doesn’t use any digital tools and apps to automate and manage its processes. A large company can’t survive without these tools, whether they’re off-the-shelf or custom-made.

In this article, we provided an overview of top enterprise mobile apps to handle all kinds of tasks, from marketing and SMM management to human resources and collaboration. The enterprise mobile app market is full of solutions, but sometimes you need to create something custom that will fully suit your needs.

If you’ve tried any of these, please let us know in the comments. And if you find that some of these tools still don’t live up to your expectations, contact us for a quote. We have vast experience developing enterprise software that’s reliable and secure.