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Author: Abhishek Nag

  • How a mobile app could help your business, even during recession

    How a mobile app could help your business, even during recession

    This year’s recession has hit our economy hard, we see layoffs all around us, and the unemployment rate is rising. During this time businesses of all sizes get affected very badly. As a business owner, you should consider how to stay alive and remain competitive. Thus, businesses can get benefit from having a mobile app during the recession, since it allows them to remain competitive and save on cost. It also helps in retaining customers and the talented workforce of the organization. Additionally, mobile apps offer businesses the opportunity to track user behavior and record the data of the customer for further purchase decisions, they also help to trace the campaign performance to decide on growth strategies. By leveraging the power of mobile apps during recession businesses can create interesting customer experiences while saving their money and increasing ROI. 

    In this article, we will look at why now is the right time to launch or upgrade your business mobile app and discuss how mobile app help in retention and maximize your profits in difficult times. 

    Reasons why businesses should invest in the mobile app during the recession: 

    During the recession, there are a very limited number of resources available and businesses need to make the most of their money. So, investing in the mobile app is the perfect solution.  

    Here are some reasons to invest in a mobile app: 

    • Cost Efficiency: Creating an app for your business is much less costly as compared to the traditional method of reaching your potential and current customers.  
    • Brand Visibility: With the help of apps, you don’t need to limit yourself to locals. You can reach and explore new markets around the globe with the help of the apps, with increased visibility you can drive more sales from new markets and survive in difficult times. 
    • Reduce employment cost: one of the fast ways to minimize cost is to reduce employee spending. A mobile app help to automate the process and streamline task and make it easier for the employees to work efficiently. 
    • Better Insights: By collecting data about your customer through the app, you can collect valuable insights about your customer like where they are lying in the sales funnel, behavior, and preferences of your customer. So, this will help you to make better decisions related to pricing and marketing campaigns.  

    Mobile apps help lower the Training and development expense:  

    During the time of economic recession, when organizations are looking for ways to cut costs. But training and development are also important not only for the freshers but also for the old employees. As a result, the need for E-platform software has grown. Through this app, employee training should now be less time-consuming. LMS (learning management system) is the core element of digitalized employee training. Through this, we can collaborate between trainer and trainee, can assess training results, track progress, and many more. Many organizations adopt their portals for learning and development. 

    • Training videos 
    • Presentations 
    • Gamification 
    • Surveys/ Quizzes 
    • Virtual conferences
    • Courses app 

    All of these and more can be easily added to your app. You can also do recruitment through these apps. Which will be less costly than your traditional method of hiring and training and development process. 

    Mobile apps boost employee retention rate: 

    One more benefit of having a mobile app during a recession it can help you to boost your employee retention rate. Businesses can’t afford to lose the talented workforce of the organization. If you provide your employees with the latest technology and timely perks which make them, feel valued and appreciated then why would a talented workforce will go somewhere else? By, investing in a mobile app you have to show you are committed to their success and growth. With the help of mobile apps, you can offer a digital feedback system so that employees can get real-time feedback on their performance. With the help of the app, they get direct access to payroll and benefits information. This also helps them to get updated on the latest changes in the organization and helps them to stay connected with the company. This can also help employees to collect all the important documents and resources. 

    Mobile apps increase sales and revenue: 

    A mobile app makes a big difference in your sales number during a time of recession. A quality app can help you engage a greater number of current customers and help you to attract new customers. In this digital era, customers prefer to shop online rather than go to shops. So, this is the chance for you to provide an awesome mobile experience to your customers through your app, you can increase a greater number of sales by engaging with your customer’s preferences. With the help of the app, you can create a personalized experience for your customer. This can also provide them with lots of options to choose the best for them and help your customer to purchase so easily without any hassle. You can also update your customer through notifications about new service offerings, discounts, offers, and many more. Mobile apps are the best to build a long-term relationship with your customers. 

    Mobile apps boost customer retention: 

    Mobile apps help businesses by giving a boost to customer retention. Through the mobile app, the customer gets to know about your services and your brand. Today’s businesses are getting more sales through app only because it is easily accessible from anywhere. And if you provide optimize shopping experience through the app, customers will do repetitive purchases. This app also helps to create a customer loyalty program and also helps to collect all the feedback through review options. You can also analyze their usage patterns that how they are interacting with the interface. This can help to create good content for your app. Posting relevant content on your app helps your customer to get better knowledge about your services or product. 

    Mobile apps are future-proof for recession and beyond: 

    Mobile apps are the future-proof strategy that can continue to serve your business for a long period even after the recession period or economic breakdown. Mobile apps can be an effective way to reach your customer and make sure your business is open for business. Mobile apps help to streamline processes and provide access to data from anywhere. The current economic breakdown has created problems for many businesses and customer and employee has to adjust to a new way of working. But mobile apps help your business to survive in difficult times by providing all the information about current marketing trends, providing your customer convenience, understanding your customer demographics and purchasing behavior, cutting your cost, and many more. With the right mobile app, businesses can take advantage of these opportunities and evolve their market in this recession. 

    Conclusion: 

    Mobile apps are a powerful tool to help your business to stay ahead and survive in a recession period. By using the right tech, you can make the most out of uncertain times by investing in a mobile app specifically that will help to boost your business and capture all the latest market opportunities. 

    Recession is a very tough situation for any business but if you have the right tools, you can turn challenging situations into an opportunity, and you can build that most powerful tool with EOV an industry-leading software company. EOV is the perfect platform to create amazing mobile apps that will surely help you to survive in the recession period. So, take control of your business during a recession – create your quality app with EOV today. 

  • Role of UX in Optimizing the Customer Journey

    Role of UX in Optimizing the Customer Journey

    In today’s highly competitive business environment, you may hear about the importance of generating high-quality leads, customer journeys, and also the importance of UX. All of these together create a perfect road for good sales. So, let us share some vital tips regarding UX that will help the customer journey as perfectly as possible along that road.

    What is UX Design?

    UX or User experience design is the procedure of making the experience of using a service or product usable, comfortable, functional, meaningful, and delightful way. UX designers are mainly responsible for the following:

    • Conducting proper audience research and leveraging existing research to have a clear idea about the tasks, goals, journey, and jobs to be completed.
    • Using the accurate design thinking procedure to find out the actual problem that can achieve proper user needs and business goals.
    • Finding out and implementing the correct research tools, like Jobs to be done, surveys, stakeholder and user interviews, usability testing, etc., for having a clear understanding of things like auditing/testing new and existing concepts, user needs, and many more.
    • Championing the value of quality design both externally and internally.
    • Identifying, prioritizing, and even implementing various new features to improve the products and services.
    • Working with stakeholders and other team members to collect information and design successful solutions.

    However, UX or User experience doesn’t always get as much priority and attention as it should. So, let us discuss how can a greater focus on user experience make your business more effective and efficient. Below are several significant considerations that can offer you a proper foundation to develop a user experience that is quite improved and hence can generate measurable and meaningful results.

    Role of UX in optimizing the customer journey

    Balancing media with usability

    In a website’s user experience, technical functionality plays a major role. One can use a compression tool like Panda if one wants to reduce the size of various types of images on their sites and allow the pages to load faster. Another way is to avoid loading a lot of media at once. However, that does not mean having videos, or any other kind of media is bad, as it’s actually the opposite. 

    Nowadays, Google rankings are becoming a vital factor, and search results with video are becoming more and more popular.

    However, the issue arrives when media integration and placement are not done accurately. This can make a site drag to a great extent, and in this situation, even the best broadband may struggle. Thus, looking for a proper balance is vital. 

    An element of user experience is that the site functions the way it must and also in the way a user expects it to. Also, it needs to be mentioned once again that Google rankings also place importance on usability, so it places even more importance on ensuring that your site can perform well and even us in good condition.

    Mobile-First design vs. Responsive design

    In this era of mobile phones, you cannot just implement a responsive design pattern for a specific website pattern and then forget about it.Actually, according to a study, 61% of website visits in the USA were done through mobile devices, which was an increased number from 2019.

    A mobile-first design is perfect for most sites these days, and while talking about a user’s experience, you don’t want your users to have trouble with navigation when most of them are visiting from their mobile devices.

    However, if your site is content-heavy and your analytics indicate that a lot of your visitors are on a desktop or laptop, then responsive design is the right option. No matter which one you choose, remember that your Google ranking may be affected in a negative way if your website is not mobile-friendly. So, remember to collect accurate data, conduct proper research and make the right decisions for your business.

    Difference between UX and UI

    UX or User experience is a lot different than UI or User interface. However, sometimes these two are mentioned in the same breath. UX is the science behind the design, strategy, and development of a desired experience that you want your users to encounter. In contrast, UI is the art as well as the interactive elements that occur from extensive UX planning.

    Though a customer journey isn’t limited to an application or website, X must still inform the right execution of your design system, leading to smoother procedures throughout.

    Inclusive design and accessibility

    As the web is for everyone, it is vital to opt for an inclusive design when you build your online assets. You may start with using color while making sure that there is very little to no conflict when differentiating colors. Similarly, proper contrast needs to be followed to help those with different levels of visual impairment.

    Therefore, whenever you wish to optimize your clients’ journey and enjoy good Google rankings, you must use the right features of user experience or UX. Looking for UX design services or mobile app development services? Contact us now!

  • How we are creating an organization focused on Customer Success 

    How we are creating an organization focused on Customer Success 

    Since inception, I was absolutely committed and focused on customer success as the most critical aspect of our business, as it leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as higher sales and revenue. In order to ensure we architect an organization that prioritizes customer success, we started from basics and touched on areas where business usually lacks focusses. Such approach was implement through the following steps. 

    Steps we followed to highlight customer success as priority

    1. Defining our customer success strategy: defining what customer success means to every partners of EOV. We pen down on key performance indicators (KPIs) and defining the outcomes which we want to achieve throughout the collaboration and post collaboration. 
    1. Foster a customer-centric culture: Creating a culture that prioritizes customer success starts with the leadership team and should be infused throughout the organization. During the initial 6 months we encouraged our people to think about how their actions would impact the customer and to always put the customer first. 
    1. Invest in customer success technology: Technology is an enabler of customer success, and we had always been clear in investing in the right tools can help EOV to deliver a more personalized and effective customer experience. We are capturing every customer insights through customer relationship management (CRM) system. The system delivers intelligence wherein the leadership including the CEO constantly work with every team members to create a path forward for better customer experience. 
    1. Foster customer engagement: At EOV we intentionally welcome customers to engage with  key stake holders of the organization and project people through regular communication, surveys, and feedback loops. Regular interaction with customers helps build trust and strengthens the customer-company relationship. We did notice customer gladly welcome our people’s thought when it comes to development and disruption, such has helped EOV to conquer the status of people first approach 
    1. Measure and track customer success: Continuously improve our customer success efforts, it is important to measure and track customer outcomes and KPIs. This includes regularly collecting customer feedback and analyzing it to identify areas of improvement. 
    1. Invest and empowering people: We believe all our people are our ambassador. We have seen Customer Success can be achieved when organization take care of their people. EOV has always endorsed “People First” approach. Which covers society as an extension. We see empowering people to take certain decision with strong mentoring and no managers has led people grow in their career and delivered better outcome for clients. Such approach has helped EOV to achieve 99.5% customer satisfaction index, 4.5 / 5.0 in terms of communication, 5.0 / 5.0 when it comes to innovation and out of the box thinking. 5.0/5.0 when it comes to technology consulting and selection, etc 
    1. Continuously iterate and improve: Finally, it is important to continuously iterate and improve your customer success efforts. This includes regularly reviewing and updating your customer success strategy, training employees, and investing in technology and resources that support customer success. 

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, creating an organization focused on customer success requires a commitment to putting the customer first, investing in technology and resources, and continuously iterating and improving. By following these steps, you can create a culture that prioritizes customer success and delivers a better customer experience. This, in turn, leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales, making it a critical aspect of any successful business strategy. 

  • How product owners should outline the Product Road-mapping and strategy 

    How product owners should outline the Product Road-mapping and strategy 

    What is a product roadmap? 

    In today’s, unpredictive technological change environment organization always tries to come up with innovative solutions for their customers when it comes to products. As the product owner, outlining the product road mapping and strategy is a crucial task that requires a thorough understanding of the market, customers, and the competitive landscape. A product roadmap is a plan of action that defines the short and long-term goals of the product. A product roadmap should always communicate its product vision. A lot of things go into a product roadmap a customer idea, feature request, internal input, and many more. The roadmap should be closely aligned with the strategy that you have already aligned. 

    When product owners establish a healthy product road mapping process it includes several stages to follow: 

    Building a product roadmap

    Understand the market and customer needs 

    Conducting market research is the first step to understanding the customer’s pain points and market trends. Analyze the competitive landscape to identify gaps in the market that your product can fill. Use this information to define the product vision and goals. The vision should be ambitious yet achievable, and the goals should be specific, measurable, and aligned with the overall business strategy. 

    Prioritize features and functionality 

    Once the vision and goals are defined, prioritize the features and functionality that align with the vision and goals. This step is crucial as it ensures that the team is focusing on the most critical aspects of the product. Use a prioritization framework like Moscow (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, and Won’t-have) or Kano model to prioritize the features. 

    Create the roadmap

    Once the features and functionality are prioritized, create the roadmap by outlining the release schedule, timelines, and dependencies of the various features and functionality. Use a visual tool like a Gantt chart or Kanban board to create the roadmap. 

    Communicate and collaborate with stakeholders

    Effective product road mapping requires ongoing communication and collaboration with stakeholders, including the development team, sales, and marketing teams, and customers. Hold regular meetings to update stakeholders on the progress of the product and gather feedback to make any necessary adjustments to the roadmap. 

    Monitor and analyze the performance

    Product Road-mapping also includes monitoring and analyzing the product’s performance and adjusting the roadmap as needed. This could include adding new features, deprioritizing existing ones, or postponing the release of certain features. Use metrics like customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and revenue to analyze the product’s performance. 

    Be Flexible

    Be prepared to pivot or change direction as market and customer needs evolve. The roadmap should be a living document that is regularly reviewed and updated to ensure that the product remains aligned with the overall business strategy. 

    Conclusion 

    Product road mapping is a crucial aspect of product development that helps teams to stay on track, focused, and aligned. The goals of the product. It enables teams to communicate effectively, set expectations, and track progress toward achieving the product’s goals. By understanding the market and customer needs, prioritizing features and functionality, creating the roadmap, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders, monitoring and analyzing performance, and being flexible, product owners can outline a strategic and effective product road mapping and strategy. 

    EOV is a B2B IT firm providing end-to-end product development solutions. EOV is an expert in mobile app development with experience in catering to organizations belonging to all industries. So, if you are looking for an innovative product development partner, EOV is here for you!

  • How to build an effective and strong product development team 

    How to build an effective and strong product development team 

    Behind every great product, there is a great product development team. Building an effective and optimal software product development team is a top priority of every organization. It’s a crucial task that requires a combination of strategy, planning, and execution. Having strong experience in digital product engineering. Organizations have implemented several strategies to achieve goals. The ultimate goal of every business is to deliver value to its customers. 

    In this blog today, we will have a brief look at the implementation of strategies for building an effective software product leadership and strong product development team. 

    Tips to build a good product development team

    Read below what’s effective in building a strong and effective product development team.

    Recruiting the right talent:  

    • Recruitment is a rigorous process that takes place to ensure that the organization brings the right talent on board. The recruitment process must include several rounds of interviews, technical assessments, and background checks. The organization should emphasize candidates who demonstrate enthusiasm for technology and show a willingness to continue learning and developing their skills. 

    Building a culture of collaboration:  

    • Organizations must encourage open communication, collaboration, and teamwork among team members. Regular meetings are to be conducted to update team members on the progress of the product and gather feedback to make any necessary adjustments to the roadmap. They should implement a culture where employees recognize and reward employees for their contributions. 

    Setting clear goals and expectations:  

    • The organization should lay down clear realistic and measurable goals for their teams and communicate them effectively. They should make sure that each team member has aware of their role and responsibility clearly. A continuous performance evaluation system should be placed to monitor the progress of employees and identify opportunities for improvement. 

    Encouraging continuous learning and improvement: 

    • They should provide ample opportunities for team members to learn and develop new skills and technologies. The organization must follow the culture of adhocracy. They should hold regular training sessions and workshops for the upliftment of the team members. 

    Lead by example: 

    •  Every team gets an equal chance to create a positive benchmark for others to follow. The organization must have low-power distance, they should hold regular one-on-one meetings with team members to discuss their progress, take suggestions, involve them in the decision-making process and create a sense of inclusion. 

     Conclusion : 

    So, by implementing these strategies at the organization, they have been able to build a strong product development team that is aligned with product vision and goals. The team members should be highly skilled, motivated, and passionate about the product, and they should work together to deliver a high-quality product that meets the needs of the customers. Additionally, the leadership team should always be proactive, supportive, and communicative, which helps to create an environment where team members can thrive.  

    So, if you are looking for an innovative solution for product engineering services, EOV is a one-step solution we are expertise to modernize your system and product, by delivering next-generation software solutions. 

  • Product Vision Importance and Where it starts

    Product Vision Importance and Where it starts

    Product Idea through development is very old. However, product owners fail to understand how to capture the idea or put an idea into a document.  You can always make building, but should the building be used for office, hotels, resorts or residential shall be conceived first. I am going to share my experience on how we shall do product visioning, what all should we capture and how shall we make things easier so that people associated can relate. Having worked with clients from Germany, Netherlands, Nordics, French, American, British concept behind product story has always been identical with little difference in aesthetics. We talk of value creation, but we never define how shall such value be created and benefit business and individual.

    Scalable technology Nodejs, JavaScript, SQL, Java, Microsoft these are most dominant tech stacks which every product companies owns. The journey of product should never start from technology. Where should it start from? Well, the answer is simple, it must start with the industrial segmentation and its problem. This means technology should be the last thing to consider.

    Let’s understand how we shall arrive at product vision. It is important for any startups to do a proper whiteboarding of product vision the product owners, CEO, CTO, and business needs to consider below ingredients:

    • Market Stats – total market size and value, what’s the percentage such business portfolio holds in revenue, controllable and uncontrollable challenges, topline impact, and bottom-line improvements
    • Demographic – Age group to target, Gender, education, etc.
    • High impact zones – this needs to cover how through the product we aim to bring impact in client’s revenue, profitability
    • Positioning – shall we position from business side like improvement of P&L or shall we position as a tech fighter
    • Features – Listing of all features under three categories – Must Have (this should give flavor of complete product), Good to have (features which client would be excited to use on daily basis and last, Nice to have something where we list down super premium features. While listing feature please note B2B and B2C customers are identical when it comes to analysis between cost and what they get in return. So, while listing product such client behavior is must to consider
    • Feature or Product experience – most important aspect. Such covers user flow, user simplicity, etc.
    • Requirement / Scope Doc – intensive document which would cover about the product idea source, current business situation, the actual idea and conceptualization through wireframes and prototypes. Such docs are never ending docs. Stake holders jumps onto meeting customer demand for features, but they don’t realize how such approach kills a product before the product move to teens
    • Budgeting – financials in step wise phase:
      • Conceptualization / Prototyping
      • Feature Enhancement at every step (development + 25% of development time in testing – functional, performance, load testing etc.)
      • Marketing Burn / spend
    • Documentation – product code documentations along with relevant test cases

    Any successful products would need committed clients who can achieve values from the product usage. It’s important for any product, to have a very easy navigation as simple as toddler can use without a thought what to do to move onto next. At least 10 different set of users from different industries. Many a time with a greater number of trial customers, product owners get accurate validation and perspectives if the product ideas and validation idea are in sync to market expectation, in other word product market fit.

    Decision on Technology

    Technology is something which is always evolving at a speed faster than space rocket. Technology should be such where scalability will never be an issue. A product vision should be initially crafted for 5 years until the basic product goes for market validation. Once the feedback and market has accepted the product then 10 years product vision should be created. Usually, such vision statements are given within first 12 months. Hence, technology shall always be considered in a way which is modern and has a stable release and enough community support.

    Decision on development partner

    I would say if a company decided to partner with external few basics should be considered. Please note no two products could be same and it would be wise to collaborate with teams who brings no prior experience in delivering similar product, at times fresh thoughts works crazy instead of trained expertise. The development partner should emphasize more on your product vision. Aligning with product vision is the core for successful development and delivery. Most of the product company has failed in their collaboration model and the core reason for such a failure is not enough understanding of product vision, scalability, product market fit and user journey. Product can introduce a dashboard later but if user journey is not done properly such impacts

    Such a detailed process in a way prepares the product for their funding rounds. Please note VCs typically look for the TAM (Total Addressable Market) by value and or size; Time to Market in $ value; Total Trial Customers, Revenue from such Customers, 10 years Product vision. The 10-year product vision statement should also hold fund utilization which the business is aiming to raise. There’s a process to do that which I will cover in the upcoming blog.