Look at the stats, and you’ll spot the trend: Businesses increasingly rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps to power their operations. The average enterprise company now has more than 350 apps in their portfolio.
Yet despite this proliferation of external apps, there will always be use cases for which companies choose to create their own solution. Homegrown applications are digital products that businesses build in-house through their own development and product teams. They can be external-facing (serving customers), internal-facing (serving employees), or a combination of both.
The strengths and challenges that come with homegrown apps
When a company chooses to build its own application, it’s usually for a combination of factors. They may seek an element of customization they can’t find on the market. They may decide that going the homegrown route adds to their competitive advantage and differentiators. They may value the security that comes with full control, the flexibility tied to having full dev ownership, or the ability to seamlessly integrate a homegrown app with other custom workflows and systems.
At the same time, the degree of flexibility and control can create bespoke challenges around homegrown apps. For one, companies may find that maintaining homegrown applications requires significant engineering and developer resources. For internal-facing homegrown apps in particular, companies risk accumulating a “frankenstack” of features—many of which may be duplicative—that leads to a confusing UX and frustration among employees over time.
These bloated, clunky interfaces not only become a drain on engineering resources and hurt employee productivity. They can also create compliance and security risks as users struggle to complete work and processes in the ways expected of them.
Fortunately, Pendo’s data-driven digital adoption platform (DAP) means these problems are 100% fixable and not at all inevitable.
Pendo and the path to optimization
To understand the difference a powerful DAP can make for custom-built applications, let’s consider an example. JLL, the global commercial real estate giant, had two homegrown apps it wanted to optimize. The first was MarketSphere, a business intelligence platform that tracks and compiles commercial real estate data and delivers reporting and analytics on it to brokers, researchers, and clients. The app had been around for a number of years, and the team suspected many of its features were going unused and could be improved or sunset. The prospect of wiring MarketSphere up to a traditional analytics platform to get those usage insights, however, was prohibitively expensive.
That’s why their team turned to Pendo. Once they saw the value of the usage data Pendo provided and began updating MarketSphere features accordingly, the JLL team saw MarketSphere’s application Net Promoter Score (NPS) increase by 30 points.
JLL also used Pendo’s DAP on a homegrown app called Blackbird, a geospatial visualization platform designed to demonstrate market knowledge to clients in a compelling way. This app was also several years old and JLL wanted to find a way to drive new feature awareness without putting a drain on engineering. With Pendo In-app Guides, JLL found that what used to take an engineer three days as a manual build could now be handled by a product manager in an hour.
Give your users (and business) the results they deserve
In JLL’s case and in so many others’, Pendo’s comprehensive platform gives unprecedented insights (with unprecedented ease) that lets companies take the right actions to streamline and optimize their app experiences. Gone are the days of having to manually wire homegrown apps to custom analytics, or build bespoke in-app guide solutions from the ground up. With Pendo, internal product teams can get straight to what matters: Creating a better user experience to drive more and better business wins.
Ready to see how Pendo can transform take your custom apps to the next level? Get a demo here.
