Since the Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of work has shifted online. Renowned businesses have introduced permanent remote working options for employees. This move had no impact on their profit. Instead, it helped businesses cut their costs and improve employee satisfaction. Then what stops you from shifting your business online? Is it the communication barrier?
Here is how you can deal with the communication barrier:
Develop an App for Professional Communication
Here is how an app can serve as a communication platform for all the employees and managers:
- Enable chatting, i.e., back-and-forth communication, allowing feedback, discussions, and resolving concerns and queries.
- Allowing voice calls/ video meetings for discussions
- Providing the option of group communication for teams
- Keeping track of all the communication conducted over text, ensuring transparency, and avoiding discrepancies
- Tracking the progress of any given project
What features to include?
To ensure that the app serves your business, you should hire a mobile app development service to develop customized software that includes all the important features for your business. As a professional communication tool, your app should include the following features:
1. Notifications
- Receivers should be notified regarding messages or calls, ensuring they don’t miss out on significant conversations. However, when employees want to take a break, they should be able to turn off the notification so that they aren’t bothered by work-related messages or calls. This feature would not only help employees in being productive, but it would also allow the employees to maintain a good work-life balance.
- You should also be able to set hours during which you would like to receive a notification. If the official working hours of your employees are 9 to 6 pm, they should not be notified about anything after these hours. However, there should be an option, slowing employees to change the hours if they are working late or taking an early off.
- Moreover, per the google app standards, message notifications should be properly formatted and designed, allowing people to respond from the notification bar only.
2. Pinning Important Conversations
- There would be a lot of communication happening over such a platform. Thus, the important conversation may get lost. So there should be an option of pinning important chats such as chatting with your team and boss, making these chats available at the top.
3. Marking Important Messages
- There are certain important messages that users may need to refer to multiple times over time. For example, the guidelines regarding a certain project. Users should have the option of marking these messages to access them easily whenever they want.
4. Search
- Users may need to look for a particular conversation that happened a long time ago. Finding that conversation would consume a lot of time. A search option would allow you to look for those conversations easily.
- Finding contact among numerous employees, managers, and clients can be very time-consuming. The search option would enable users to find any contact in no time.
5. Allow Attachments
- Professional communication often involves the exchange of numerous documents and images. Your software should allow users to share files easily.
6. Allow tagging relevant people
- In a pool of hundreds of messages in a group chat, an important message might get missed out by the relevant person. The tagging option would allow the relevant person to take notice of that message.
7. Integrated with a Customer Relationship Management Software
- While this is not essential, it will be very useful for your business if your business model entails dealing with multiple clients.
- The CRM software allows the employees and manager to keep track of business activities: it allows you to keep track of the progress of the project, past projects with the same client, and customer satisfaction and retention rate.
- Giving employees access to CRM software via the communication system would make communication more productive. There will be one platform where managers and employees can check all work-related activities.
8. Access to Past Projects
- All the projects can be uploaded on the app, making them accessible for users later as well.
- Though this feature is not necessary at all, it will be particularly useful because:
- If there is any issue concerning the project files, the original file will be available in the storage. An employee can access that file and show it to the respective authorities to get away from any unnecessary blames and issues.
- Employers will have access to all the files, enabling them to monitor the quality of work
- New employees that need guidance will be able to access older projects for learning and guidance purposes.
- Since some of the files may be confidential, the uploaders should have the option of choosing who should be able to access the files.
The Functionality of your App
Your app needs to be very easy to use and should be capable of managing a lot of data. Each function should be performed by the app smoothly. Otherwise, employee motivation and performance will be negatively impacted.
Moreover, your mobile app should be accessible via desktop as well so that people don’t have to work over two devices simultaneously.
Accordingly, you should get a custom app developed by a mobile app development service so that all the essential features are incorporated into your app, depending upon your requirements.
Cost of Developing a Professional Communication App
App development includes multiple processes, and you need to allocate a budget for each of these processes.
You need to allocate a budget for:
- Market Research and Planning
- UI/UX designing
- Coding – Front-end and Back-end development
- Testing for Quality assurance
- Launching and maintaining the software
Since this app will be very personalized, depending upon your business needs, your app development cost can be around $100,000. However, a good mobile app development service can guide you better regarding cost-saving strategies.
Conclusion
It’s the age of working smart instead of working hard. Improve your employees’ performance and save the cost of running a business by building an app that enables employees to work efficiently remotely. In addition, this app would allow you to hire talented individuals from anywhere in the world!
You may take inspiration from some already existing communication apps that enable good communication among business owners, managers, and employees. Accordingly, you should invest in a customized app via a reliable mobile app development service.
Also read: What are The Advantages of Angular Software Development?
