Businesses big and small often struggle to find a useful purpose for their mobile apps.
This is especially frustrating because developing and updating an app so it remains at least somewhat functional requires more than a nominal investment.
Well, it appears that businesses are finally realizing this and many will give up on their apps in the next year or two. According to new data from Gartner, 20 percent of businesses will drop their mobile app by 2019.
Why Businesses Will Abandon Their Mobile App
And the reasoning is quite simple: they’re just not worth the investment. Not only is there the initial cost of developing a mobile app. You have to keep it updated, deal with customer problems, and then promote it to customers in the hope that they might download it.
There’s more data to show that they won’t, despite your best effort. And even if they do, getting customers to use it requires more skill and often, bending over backwards to make it worth a customer’s effort.
Rather than invest in a mobile app, Gartner finds more businesses will be and are investing in automated customer service tech and chat apps to stay in touch with customers.
“As more customers engage on digital channels, VCAs are being implemented for handling customer requests on websites, mobile apps, consumer messaging apps and social networks,” managing vice president at Gartner Gene Alvarez says in the report. “This is underpinned by improvements in natural-language processing, machine learning and intent-matching capabilities.”
Gartner also found that 84 percent of companies they surveyed plan to invest in improving their customer experience in the coming year. One major way of doing that is adding Virtual Customer Assistants. Some businesses told Gartner since implementing a VCA, they’ve had as much as a 70 percent reduction in time and resources spent answering customer questions.
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This article, “1 in 5 Businesses Will Abandon Their Mobile App by 2019” was first published on Small Business Trends