No matter in which industry you're (aviation, insurance, edtech, marketing, manufacturing), you can't meet your customer needs and make more sales by having a standard software that everyone is having.
The bad part? You're paying regular subscription fee for commercially available software and yet not enjoying the benefits to a full extent because you’ve no control over it.
The other way is to develop a custom software for your business that initially requires significant investment but comes with handful of benefits – more customization features, make your business standout and brings higher ROI.
Read on this blog to find out what customer software means and the benefits it provides to your business.
What does custom software development mean?
Unlike off the shelf software that's commercially available to wide range of users, customized software is available for meeting specific business needs.
Custom developed software can range anything from a simple point of sale system, an inventory management system to a complex accounting software.
According to Grandview Research, the market size of custom software development is expected to increase at a CAGR of 22.5% from 2024 to 2030. This implies that more and more businesses are realizing the need of creating custom applications.
Of course, creating and designing a custom software solution requires more investment from your side but the benefits are worth rewarding it. You can scale the software as per your growing business needs, integrate with existing applications and more importantly solve your business problems.
Why is there a need to create custom software?
“According to Luca Dal Zotto, Cofounder of Rent a Mac - “Every business needs a custom software today to streamline their processes and meet their business needs”.
” He shared his experience in working with a logistics firm that has customized inventory control software.
Designing such custom software reduces their cost of operations by 30% and speeds up their delivery by 20%. Such benefits can’t be achieved using off-the-shelf software.
How prebuilt software is different from custom development?
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Purpose: While off-the-shelf software caters to more general needs and a wider audience, custom software targets a narrowly defined set of needs.
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Integration possibilities: Off-the-shelf software may give hard time integrating with other software systems, while custom software is designed and developed to facilitate integration.
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Implementation: Off-the-shelf software is purchased and is more often than not, tested thoroughly for glitches or errors.
On the other hand, custom software is built from scratch by an in-house development team or outsourced to a third party. These applications though tested by developers might face errors or bugs while running and might need maintenance now and then.
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Flexibility to scale: Since off-the-shelf software is purchased and not owned, it might not serve the needs of a scaling business, while custom software development provides the flexibility to scale as per business requirements.
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Upgrades: While upgrades to off-the-shelf software are not in a business’s hands, they often have to wait for the owners to update applications and this might cause losses to their business.
However, with custom software, a business can update or upgrade an application whenever it feels that it is the right time to enhance the features and functionalities of the application to match the growing business levels.
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Cost: Since off-the-shelf software targets a wider audience, the cost of purchasing it is less than the cost of building an application specific to business needs from scratch. The cost of creating a custom software solution varies depending on few factors such as -
a. How simple or complex the application is? Is that a simple app or a more complex internal backend system?
b. How complex is the user experience?
c. Are there too many features and pathway in that app?
d. Does the software need to integrate with existing systems?
What benefits businesses get from developing custom software?
Designing a tailor-made software has extensive benefits. Some of these benefits are as given below-
1. Personalized for your business needs
With custom software development, a business targets its specific set of business needs and, moves closer to achieving business goals efficiently.
A business has its own set of objectives, targets, and workflows. One size fits all approach would not benefit it. Custom software development, on the other hand, facilitates application customization, application modernization, and management, giving businesses the power to drive their software.
Custom-made software enhances a business’s productivity and allows them to have a competitive advantage with the inclusion of bespoke features and functionalities.
2. Flexibility to accommodate changes
Since bespoke software development is a process that is driven by business requirements, the application built has more flexibility to accommodate updates and changes. An application can grow in scope, features, and functionalities, as a business grows.
An off-the-shelf software, on the other hand, might not align with a business's growing needs or might become too costly to license. A business thus should always take a call keeping its future scaling needs in mind.
3. Seamless Integration
It is easy to integrate a custom-made application with other software systems in the organization. These applications are compatible with the business ecosystem while off-the-shelf software is not. The latter might face a hard time integrating with already existing business systems and as a result, show errors.
Custom software is easily integrated and enhances the business process and operations, leading to higher business productivity.
4. Enhanced security and reliability
With custom software, a business gets enhanced security as it adds security measures that it feels are imperative to the working of software and business. One does not need to rely on the restricted security features of an off-the-shelf product.
Moreover, with custom software, a business has all the control of applications in its hands. This includes pricing, terms, and conditions of use, updates, etc. It is thus a more reliable option than an off-the-shelf application.
5. Easy to use and manage
Custom-made software is easy to use, manage and control as they have the involvement of a business from start to end. The business knows its product through and through and hence is aware of its usage and best practices.
Although custom software requires constant support and maintenance, it’s all worth the cost. When a business knows the ins and outs of a product, it becomes easy to use, maintain, and scale.
6. Makes the customers feel personalized
Custom software isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; it’s tailored to your business needs and is meant to provide a personalized experience to users.
After all, who doesn’t love personalization. Even Research states that 76% of customers love personalized experiences so much because they're tired of seeing old generic software every day.
When you design custom software to deliver personalized user experiences, you build long-lasting customer business relationships. This increases your customer loyalty because it’s made for them.
7. Delivers better ROI for your business in the long term
Developing customized software can be a game changer in terms of increasing sales, making customers happy, and streamlining your business operations.
Initially, it demands higher upfront investment, but the rewards are worth considering in the long run as you need not worry about purchasing additional software or adding a bunch of unnecessary features to it.
“Tornike Asatiani, CEO of Edumentors said – Custom software development is a real game changer for businesses. He once worked with a logistics company where the company faced trouble with bad routes and late deliveries.
” Because off the shelf software solutions didn’t meet their goals, they get the customized AI-driven route optimization system. Within just 3 months, fuel costs went down by 27% and shipping times improved by 27%.
Now let’s look at the custom software development process.
Custom Software Development Process
A custom designed software development process involves the following steps:
1. Product strategy, and planning
This step involves undertaking market and competitive research, identifying the missing product in the market, and organizing client/internal meetings to discuss and pass the product and plan its specifics.
This stage involves talks about the what, why, and how of the product. Software Requirement Specifications (SRS), a document based on which the product is designed and developed is also prepared in this stage.
2. Product design, development, and testing
The next step includes deciding on the UI/UX design, and developing the product based on product specifications or SRS. After development, the product is tested for errors and bugs.
Moreover, a product is tested for its core application functions, installation on localized machines, compatibility on multiple devices, and text input. Both functional and non-functional testing is undertaken.
3. Product deployment and maintenance
The last step involves hosting the product and keeping it up and running for a lifetime with constant support and maintenance. For deployment, a business needs to decide whether it wants cloud-based deployment or on-premise deployment.
While the former provides businesses with scalable and flexible virtual computing resources, in the case of the latter, the software is located on a company’s servers under the protection of an internal firewall.
What are the disadvantages of creating custom software for businesses?
Here are a few limitations of creating tailor-made software for your business-
1. Requires more significant investment
It's challenging for startups or companies with limited budget to create a custom software.
Generally, the average cost of developing bespoke software ranges between $30,000 to $100,000 and can go beyond that depending on the complexity of it.
2. Longer time to market products
The time required to create customized software is around 4-9 months. On top of that, there are multiple iterations and back-and-forth revisions based on customer feedback which increases the development time.
But the software you get at the end will be personalized as per your business needs.
3. Outsourcing the development work to the wrong vendor
Choosing the wrong offshoring vendor can be a downfall for your business. It might be you spent hard-earned money on getting custom-designed software, but it was not created as per your expectations, or your customers weren't satisfied.
How to decide whether to develop custom software in-house or outsource the same?
After understanding the basics of custom designed software development, a business might be confused about whether to build it in-house or if should they contract out the development process to a third party. The last section of this blog addresses this question to help a business decide with the help of some use cases.
A business should opt for in-house custom software development when:
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It prefers to be involved in and manage all aspects of software development in-house
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has a skilled and experienced in-house team
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When the scope is ambiguous and requires course correction as a result of regular brainstorming with internal stakeholders
A business should go for outsourced product development when:
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the business has just started or it is a start-up to leverage third-party expertise, experience, and economies of scale
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it has a fair budget allocated to the software development
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the in-house team lacks the technical expertise or diverse industry experience required to develop a reliable and scalable product
For more check out our Offshore Outsourcing vs In-House Team blog.
When a business outsources a product development, it benefits from professional advice and consultation, and years of varied experience. These factors help a business avoid expensive business mistakes and software failures.
How BigOhTech can help you with custom software development?
Creating a customized software has become NECESSITY for every business to not just adapt as per customer needs but to become more innovative in their fields. We understand your business ideas before creating a digital product for you.
We don’t want you to work with old legacy software especially when every business is different. As a custom software development agency, we build scalable solutions for you by integrating the latest technologies like AR/VR, AI/ML, and blockchain so you can provide the best possible user experience and change the way how you manage your business operations.
We’ve even helped Bharti Airtel Limited, a leading telecommunication company in the USA by developing an on-demand entertainment platform for their users. We integrated advanced features and functionalities so that users can enjoy streaming services on the go.
Want to know the results? Their paid subscribers have increased, average viewing time has risen and has now become India’s fastest OTT aggregator platform.
FAQs:
Q1. What are the benefits of developing custom software for my business?
A custom software allows a business to target its exact business needs, scale the software as per requirements and easily integrate it with existing technical infrastructure.
Q2. How can custom software development improve the efficiency of my business processes?
Custom software development helps a business target its needs, streamline workflows with easy to use, manage and control applications. Thus, enhancing business productivity and efficiency.
Q3. Can custom software development help my business save money in the long run?
Yes, custom software development is the number one choice for businesses. It may appear to be more expensive in the short run, but in the long run, it is designed to keep your business, and your customers in mind.
The benefits of custom software development clearly outweigh the costs, making custom software development the number one choice of businesses.
Q4. How can custom software development improve the customer experience for my business?
Use of analytics in custom software development helps in market and predictive analysis and provides customer insights after studying and analyzing behaviors and patterns.
Q5. What are the advantages of having software that is scalable and can adapt to changing business needs?
Every company wants to scale; it’s a good problem to have. Most businesses fail due to a lack of scalability in their architecture and an inability to adapt to changing business needs.
BlackBerry and Nokia were the most notable failures due to scalability issues, as their mobile operating systems were unable to adapt to changing business needs.
Their software, or operating system, could not display high-resolution images for emails or play games even when better and more affordable hardware was introduced. It’s no surprise that they lost the game to companies like Android and Apple, which understood customer needs and desires.
