Custom Software Solutions: How Going Custom Can Impact Your Bottom Line

For many years, companies that have sought to improve their business functions and streamline their processes across the board have often had to rely on adding personnel to meet their goals. This has become such a common practice that the other options are hardly ever considered. However, there is one option in particular that we believe is worth revisiting: custom software solutions.

Custom software solutions are a recent trend for companies looking to improve their ROI, bring down their customer acquisition cost, and impact their bottom line. By streamlining and automating business services, not only are you freeing up more time to work on higher level projects, but you will be saving time and money in the process.

Today, we are going to lay out exactly how adopting a custom software solution for your business can impact your bottom line and bring your companies business processes into the 21st century. Let’s take a look.

The first question that you might have when it comes to CSS is “Why not just use an off-the-shelf solution?” After all, there are plenty of solutions out there that boast similar capabilities to what a custom software solution at a fraction of the price.

While it is true that there are off-the-shelf methods out there that work for companies, going custom ensures that you will have everything you need to succeed. Most off-the-shelf solutions are able to cut costs because they solve one business solution very well.

But what happens when you need to use this solution for a different business problem? Since you can’t use the solution you currently have, you will need to get another. And another. And another. As time goes on you will realize that if you had employed a custom software solution at the beginning, you would have saved money over time. Start off with CSS first to save yourself a headache down the road.

Once you have decided which solution you are going to pursue, the next step is to figure out which tasks and processes you want to streamline and automate. This will be different for every business, but in order to give you a good jumping off point, here are a few of the custom software solutions we have seen other businesses use for success.

Some businesses have scheduling requirements that are anything but simple. If you are trying to juggle scheduling jobs or managing other administrative deadlines, a custom software solution might be a good fit for your company.

A custom software solution can estimate new job schedules by analyzing current workload and prior commitments. Additionally, you can set up your solution so that it tracks recurring tasks in order to provide consistency to your clients across the board.

Again, while there are many productivity tools out there for data collection and analysis, creating a custom software solution for your business simply outmatches anything on the market. Not only does having a CSS allow you to collect data, but it also can help you keep everything in the same place.

Information like employee policies and job checklists can be kept in a central location, allowing easy access and use by your team. By keeping everything in obvious places, your team will be able to work at a much more efficient pace.

One of the most important considerations when working to maintain custom relationships is consistency. A surefire way to make sure that you have consistent brand messaging across all of your channels is to automate the process with a custom software solution.

By having all of the information necessary for dealing with clients in the same place, whether it be sales or custom service, will allow your teams to work better with each other as well as with customers.

Additionally, you can set up processes that do the work for you and automatically send information like thank you emails, appointment reminders, and whatever else your customers might need.

For teams that are looking to have complete transparency and oversight of projects, custom software makes coordinating these projects easy. Not only can you have a higher degree of scalability and flexibility with a custom solution, but if you are working with the right company they can design a project coordinator based on your existing workflow.

Within this you can track labor costs, time spent on each portion of the project, and potentially even work within an Agile development framework. Once you are able to measure the success of this program and pick up on new areas to improve, your process is only going to become more streamlined.

The last way in which you can take advantage of custom software solutions to impact your bottom line is through integration. Like we mentioned at the beginning, there are some companies out there who are already working with off-the-shelf solutions that they want to integrate their CSS with.

This is where using a custom software solution goes from good to great. By integrating across the board with all of the systems you can, you can streamline everything in your business. This is what custom software solutions were designed to do, so make good use of them.

Hopefully, now that you have seen exactly how a custom software solution can help your business, it is our hope that your next question is “How do I get started?” There are many different ways to build a custom software solution depending upon your business and the needs you are hoping to fill.

When you are looking for the right company to help you with your project, make sure that they know what your goals are and the areas that you value. This should be a common practice for the company you work for, but since you are ultimately who will be using the solution, make sure that it meets your standards.