“The focus previously has been the digitising of the back-office process, but with the advent of technology in the customers’ hands, it’s now moving to the front end,” Thorogood says. “The very widespread adoption of technology allows customers to interact easily with firms, so interfacing with customers is now very clearly an area of great interest.”
Presently, just 18% of Australian businesses offer a mobile app, but almost 50% of businesses plan to develop one during the next three to five years, according to this year’s Optus Future of Business Report. Retail, entertainment and finance businesses are the most likely to be developing apps. Only 5% of businesses take mobile payments but this is forecast to increase almost fivefold.
Device revolution
Businesses need to think about how they take advantage of the trend to increased smartphone usage, says Jeffrey Tobias, a business strategist and program director at the AGSM. “People used to talk about ‘my mobile phone’, now people talk about ‘my mobile device’,” he says. “It’s a device as opposed to a phone because the functionality of mobile devices has increased enormously.”
Tobias claims the days when a company could simply spend a few hundred dollars turning their websites into apps are long gone. “It reflects hugely badly on the business,” he says. “It’s like having a shop front that isn’t enticing to the customer, so why would you do it?”
Good apps are intuitively easy to use and make use of the capabilities of the device they’re running on. They also deliver value, says Tobias, be it entertainment value, transactional value or information value.
Frontrunners among organisations that can most obviously make use of apps are banks, which are using them to facilitate easy mobile transactions, and media companies, which use them to push out news and entertainment. However, other businesses with a less obvious need for apps are also developing them.
Sydney butcher Vic’s Premium Quality Meat launched its ‘Ask the Butcher’ app in December 2009. The app contains a diagram of the different cuts of lamb, beef, pork and veal, as well as information and recipes for each one. There’s also a timer, cooking temperatures, durations and weights for each cut.
“The words innovative and meat don’t necessarily go together in the same sentence,” says Vic’s Meat chief executive Anthony Puharich. “But as a business and an authority on meat we’re constantly looking at ways to innovate and communicate with our customers and get the broader message out in terms of what we’re all about as a business.”
The app was developed by digital agency Protein One, which did the layout and the IT work, but the idea and the content for the app came from Vic’s Meats, which is also the company behind high-end Sydney butcher Victor Churchill. While many companies risk putting out useless apps if they don’t ask customers what they want, Vic’s Meat got it right.
“We were the ones who picked out what we thought was relevant and important and what people wanted to know about,” says Puharich. “We didn’t do any market research or speak to customers. It was gut instinct and our expertise in our chosen field about what we felt was the right information.”
The $1.99 app has been hugely successful. It’s Australia’s most popular paid food app and has surprised Puharich by recouping its development costs. It has also succeeded in its original purpose, which was to market the business.
“The flow on and the additional benefit that we’ve derived across all of our businesses because of the app – I can’t measure it for you – but it’s certainly benefitted the business,” Puharich says.
