10 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade From Generic to Custom Applications

Let's be honest, the generic option for just about anything kinda sucks, and its the same thing for applications. Every business faces its own challenges, diverse employee needs, and a unique customer base -- and trying to fit all that into an out-of-the-box application is just never going to be a smooth experience. This experience only gets worse when you are dealing with massive amounts of sensitive data and off-premises solutions, such as in the oil & gas industry sector. 

In this week's blog, we are going to discuss the (x) downfall(s) of the generic application, and show you the (x) benefits of adopting custom, tailor-made digital solutions.

Let's get into it. Starting with why going the generic route is hurting your business. 

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1. Lack of ownership and control: When you first got started, that generic application may actually have worked really well for your needs. But as you grow and your workflows and processes adapt and change, there is no guarantee that app will continue to work for you. Now you're all grown up and all you have is a broken application to show for it. That makes your customers very sad. 

2. Poor overall quality: Yes, generic Advil works similarly to brand-name Advil, but it looks ugly and you automatically just don't trust it quite as much as the real one. Well, customers more than likely feel the same way about your generic application. Yes it works well enough, but it's slower than it could be, not as aesthetically pleasing as it could be, and doesn't showcase your brand as well as it could. 

3. Limited feature sets: Since-off-the-app-store solutions are generally made to appeal to the needs of many rather than the few, they tend to favour features that will be appropriate for as many industries or businesses as possible. Your business is as unique as they come and most likely has different needs, customers, and employees to everyone else around you. As a result, those generic apps just aren't going to be able to keep up with you as you grow. 

4. Slow updates & rollouts: Did a new feature rollout break a critical function that your team uses as part of their workflow? I guess you are stuck using either a broken version or an out-of-date version while the powers that be go through a lengthy QA and approval process to get the app back into working shape -- and that's assuming that the update even fixes the app properly on the first go. 

5. Lack of customization: Imagine this -- you just spent your marketing budget on a generic application for your company, only for it be plastered with generic logos, colour schemes, and watermarks. Now you have to upgrade your subscription model to be able to change these or get a new theme. Meanwhile, the entire time your customers are using this application, they're thinking to themselves, "Wow, this looks kind of unprofessional!"

Custom-developed applications are built specifically for your organization. To build custom B2B software, your company works hand-in-hand with the developers (Poeta) to select features, capabilities, and functionality that best suit your needs.

The main goal of custom development is to understand the unique challenges a business is facing with digitalization and process automation -- and to design a tool that will solve these. The entire application will be centred around your company’s needs and wants, and can be tweaked as needed if additional pain-points surface during testing or QA. 

Here are 5 more reasons why you should consider going custom. 

1. High amounts of flexibility and scalability: As you and your business slowly mature, you will start to notice some changes. Luckily, you have made the right decision and partnered with an Agile development team that can effectively pivot the development of your application to best support you and any changes that come your way.

2. Industry-specific tools: You're the industry experts, we are the software experts. Any industry-specific issues you had with the generic application can be fixed during production. It's just a matter of when. 

3. Tailor-made training: When you build custom, you often need to additionally upgrade other aspects of your technology solutions, which might leave some of your team a little out-of-date. Not to worry. Since you are working directly with a dev team, you can access easy training solutions for your team, such as comprehensive walk-through videos or knowledge-transfer sessions. 

4. Your own personal IT Services: When you work directly with developers like us, you get the added benefit of a help desk where you and your employees can directly log change requests, bug fixes, or feature enhancements, so that the dev team can get started on an update right away -- getting you and your team back to work as fast as possible. 

5. The (software) friendships you make along the way: Relationships with people can be difficult to manage. Luckily, this doesn't have to be the case with your software. Your custom software can be painlessly integrated with other applications, websites, CRM's, and can even utilize powerful API integrations to ensure you make the most out of your well-spent money. 

Conclusion

It's not looking too great for the generic brand, is it? Not to worry. The experts at Poeta Digital are here to sit down with you for a free consultation. We can review your current solutions, provide you with an in-depth roadmap, and work with you every step of the way to modernity. Custom software? Check. Cloud architecture lift and shifts? You got it. Updated security? Easy. All in a convenient, easy-to-use package for you and your customers. 

Simply navigate over to our shiny new site at poetadigital.com/contact and get your digital transformation started.