Everyone understands that customer service is important to any business, from the smallest business to the largest corporation. The quality and timeliness of that service will do one of two things: it will enhance or degrade customer loyalty to your brand and ultimately to your business. With the economy in yet another recession, customers are becoming more and more savvy, realizing that they have more alternatives than ever before. This is the reason why it’s so important to understand how new technologies can help you anticipate customer needs and to tailor business processes in order to best serve customers.

Whether customers interact with your brand through Media, Enterprise (productivity apps, task management, collaboration platforms), Mobile Payments (BLE/iBeacon, POS Integration, Tokenization, EMV, etc.), Retail (loyalty, gift card integration, store locators, mobile payment capabilities), or QSR (quick service restaurant payment programs, mobile ordering systems, gift card integration, nutritional information display, restaurant locators), developing the right technology is vital. Partnering up with a mobile app company like Clearbridge Mobile (that comes backed with a portfolio that includes Tim Hortons and Microsoft) that understands how to bring customers closer to your brand will be the decision that makes or breaks your business.

The best mobile app development companies will have a carefully-honed, systematic, and collaborative approach to developing apps that involves several important stages. These will often involve Product Strategy, Design, Development, Project Management, as well as Quality Assurance teams that will help build on your company’s current model to take your idea, and develop it to meet contemporary business technology demands. Project Management teams will define the work necessary to make a new app or develop your existing media platform; Project Managers ensure that product milestones are met at appropriate times. The Product Strategy team will define and develop the timeline of creation and lay out a road map for how the development of your new technology will be used after its creation. To learn more about the project management roadmap, check out one of the many useful articles at Clearbridgemobile.com/blog/ and get an idea of the big picture.

The Design stage is very important as it dictates the way your customers deal with your application. It deals with the visual and aural aspects of the application (which includes color, texture, sound, animation, and everything else that the user experiences), the relationship between User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX), and the Development stage tests and perfects the underlying code that defines how your app works. Once your app has been created and tested through trial runs — all of which happens with your input and approval — the Quality Assurance team steps in to make certain that the app works in precisely the manner it was meant to and is ready to be released to the public. Some of the best app development companies will even provide post-launch maintenance in order to guarantee a totally bug- and glitch-free product.

If you want to make the next major technological leap in customer service and relations, consider developing the right application — one that brings your customer base closer to your business.