Build Engaging Mobile Apps that Drive Your Customer Experience

Business teams face huge pressure to build engaging mobile apps that will improve their customer experience, attract consistent feedback and deliver higher app-store ratings.

The Apple and Google ecosystems already have millions of apps. Countless more will arrive as mobile technology becomes thoroughly mainstream. How will organizations develop mobile apps that break out from the pack and provide an irresistible customer experience in the 2020s?

A lot depends on the scope of the challenge and the nature of their industries:

• Startups and digital native companies want to invent new mobile services to disrupt existing business models.
• Medium-sized corporations and smaller enterprises have mobile apps they want to refresh or reinvent to stay relevant in a crowded market.
• Large enterprises need global mobile-app factories to manage and streamline their extensive app portfolios.

Though the specifics will shift from one organization to the next, these five factors will be pivotal to succeeding at mobile application development in this decade:

Business vision. You need a solid vision to address the entire customer journey in your mobile apps. As you know, mobile won’t be optional — it will become central to companies’ approach to engaging customers, collaborating with vendors and expanding market share.

Whether you’re a venture-funded startup hoping to disrupt a market or a corporate titan building a mobile-app lab, you’ll need to stay attuned to the shifting demands of customers and the challenges you’re trying to solve.

Customer experience focus. There will be no easing in the push to develop mobile apps that give users exactly what they want, when they want it. You need to pay extra attention to customer experience and visualize the entire journey before you build mobile apps.

Make sure you have a product owner who truly owns the product backlog and churns high-value features that are delivered in iterative way.

App analytics. Data science, machine learning and natural language processing will transform mobile apps in this decade. As 5G bandwidth becomes widespread, massive volumes of data will pave the way to advanced analytics that improve predictive capability.

Mobile developers will have to fully understand how to pull these capabilities into a holistic user experience that can be highly customized without intruding on the customer’s sense of privacy.

You need to have a clear strategy to act based on app analytics.

Culture of agility. Companies that develop mobile apps will have to move quickly to adapt to new technologies and competitive threats. Moreover, future-focused developers will lean even more heavily on Agile and DevOps principles to speed new products into the marketplace and manage their software update cycle.

Though Agile processes are more often associated with startups and digital natives, companies of all sizes and scopes will have to find nimble, fast and flexible approaches to mobile app development to drive business value.

Delivery consistency. Expanding enterprise app portfolios will require standardization of development, collaboration, testing and other crucial functions to deliver consistent apps. This is especially true for large companies with multiple product lines that each have their own apps.

Companies need to look at cross-platform app development frameworks like React Native or Xamarin that eliminate duplication of effort in developing for Android and iOS. But even cross-platform apps will require standard practices and methodologies if companies hope to develop sophisticated app factories serving the entire enterprise.

Choose the Right Partner for Mobile App Development

Few companies have the resources to fold these five factors into a cohesive approach to mobile application development. DMI closes this gap. We are one of the early adopters of mobile app technology and have been building mobile apps for more than 10 years. We’ve developed more than 3,000 mobile apps for global enterprise companies, government and federal agencies and nonprofit organizations. We also have managed mobile services that help large companies tackle the complexities of mobile workforces. Analysts consistently rate DMI as a leader in the mobile apps space, and our apps have won many industry awards.

Our experts in customer experience, system design, mobile app development, analytics and microservice architecture cover the full mobile stack. Moreover, our consulting approach ensures everything we build aligns with our clients’ business strategy. These are the kinds of skills that make DMI globally one of the top mobile development providers.

— Rajesh Pawar, VP, Mobile Apps Practice Head