5 Signs You Need an App, Not Just a Website

If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that apps are far easier to navigate than traditional websites, built for mobile devices and for browsing on the go.

In the modern world where consumers want everything instantly, these are benefits you simply cannot overlook.

While having a website remains an important foundation for most businesses, hosting landing pages and facilitating online orders and contact forms, business apps support everything from internal processes to the customer journey.

Here are five signs that you need to be turning your attention – and all your existing processes - towards a bespoke business app.

1. Your customers engage with your business online

If your customers interact with your business online, then providing an app is likely going to improve their experience. Have a look at your data, do they access it from mobiles more than desktops?  What do they do on the site and how long do their spend on it?  Perhaps their experience can be optimised with an app.

From gamifying regular engagement to making browsing and contact processes more streamlined, having an app creates a quick and easy interface for customers. It’s like your website, but better.

2. You want to improve the customer experience

Once upon a time, having a website was considered the gold standard in delivering a cohesive and multi-channel customer experience.

Today, websites have limitations that apps are designed to overcome.

From making business interactions more intuitive, to delivering a personalised experience that automates processes/uses AI to learn the user’s behaviour, and not forgetting using the mobile phones native hardware, a great app can make the customer experience better and more memorable.  

Not to mention it makes on-the-go connection easier, and adopts increasingly creative ways of keeping your business and customers in tune with each other; push notifications, offline functionality and much more are available on apps.

3. You use hardware in your business

Of course, not all the benefits of a business app are reserved for customer-facing processes and actions.

Many businesses first engage the services of an app development team in the search for more streamlined systems and processes. While administrative needs require a whole separate area of app design (more on that in the next section!) a business app can also connect team members with hardware.

Our recent work with various NHS Trusts used an app to digitise checklists across different operating theatre locations in a handsfree way (Bluetooth connected headsets).  

Consumers, meanwhile, are just as likely to reach for an app to manage and control their at-home technology and smart devices as they are a manual remote.

Remote connectivity has become a part of our everyday life and is something businesses shouldn’t shy away from.

4. You’re wasting time on administrative tasks

To understand this one, you need only look at our work with a business expense management process for one of our clients.

The build of an app can prove invaluable when optimising the way a business is run, as this company found out when they finally used an app designed to streamline the expenditure process through automation. Suddenly the manual task of managing 50+ expense claims per week multiplied to being able to handle 1500+ thanks to automation and app-enhanced processes.  Did someone say AI expense claim approvals?

5. You’re a growing business in 2025!

All things considered, there aren’t many business challenges – internal and customer-facing – that can’t be improved with a better user experience and interface for your users.

The beauty of working with a bespoke app development company is that you don’t even have to know exactly what the solution you need looks like. You simply need a challenge to overcome and the foundations of a vision, letting us do the rest.

Our job is to bring apps to life that makes the online world better for businesses and their customers. Find out more by getting in touch.