Did you find the title a bit intriguing?
Well, it is probably a reality in your business too!
Simply put, if you are using too many applications in your day to day business operations I would think that you are running an application zoo in your company!
The technology was invented to make our life and business management simpler and less complicated. This is also why several applications are being brought into our work. But what happens when you are in the middle of too many applications, each performing different tasks and fulfilling different purposes? What this does is quite far from making things less complicated. Using so many different apps will compartmentalize the work a bit too much and make things more difficult.
In a recent chat with a telecom company in Dublin, I found out that they use far too many applications for the work they do. For instance, they are using
- Slack for internal chat,
- Intercom for chat with customers on their website
- WordPress for inbound marketing
- Gravity forms on website for information collection
- Zendesk for ticket management,
- Zoho Invoice for billing and
- Zoho CRM for sales management
- Sage Line 50 for accounting
- Excel sheets for stock management (they provide IP phones)
- Google suite for email and calendar management
- There was another app for human resource management but I can’t remember the name of it anymore.
What they also told me was that none of these applications are interacting with each other. So, it’s difficult to report how many customers were coming from the website and getting converted to customers. Once they become a customer you need to be able to identify how many tickets did they raise last month? do they have arrears on their account, etc. etc?
If the same customer called three customer service representatives on separate occasions they all would have to go through multiple systems to find information about the customer and hence the customer management is a nightmare.
Are you having the same issue with your company? Put a comment at the bottom of the article and tell us how many applications you use in your company and the issues you have been experiencing?
Undoubtedly, this makes running the business more cumbersome and less productive. What is the solution here? How do we get everything under one roof in order to facilitate a smooth process?
One option is to integrate everything using APIs and try to make every app talk to each other, but that’s easier said than done. Once you go down this route, your IT team will spend most of the time making sure every integration is always working. Every time there is an update to one of the APIs the sync will stop working and I’m sure you can calculate the possibility of this when you have so many different apps in question.
The second option is to look for is one application which has the widest footprint when it comes to business management.
Wouldn’t life be so easy if we knew about such an app?
Well if you want I can definitely talk about three of them which spring to mind very quickly.
Now, if I start writing about each of these products individually to tell you how they can make your life easy, It will make this blog very long. So, let me break these down into individual articles. And you’ll get to read about them one by one every week.
Goodbye for now but do let me know how many apps you are using and how you are keeping them in sync.
