Business Phones And Apps- How to Find The Good Apps And Avoid The Bad

One of the hottest topics, as in “hot under the collar”, regarding business phone systems is the subject of phone apps. If you read some of the reviews on Google and Apple, you’ll read scathing condemnations of some apps and to put it mildly sarcastic reviews of others. Google and Apple in particular have gone to some lengths to make sure users are in the loop about the apps for their products, partly because some of these crocks could otherwise reflect very badly on their products.

Bluntly, some apps are so bad that they’re not worthy of being called apps. They’re junk. The “organizer” apps are among the worst, least inspired, and almost insulting of all. You could achieve the same results, and less irritatingly, with Post-It notes as you can with these dino-apps. Others are less obviously useless, complete with nice graphics which distract from their inherent pointlessness.

The real problem is that with business apps, the stakes are raised, often greatly. Imagine depending on some half-baked app for doing business with clients. Not great for the business image. Clients don’t usually appreciate having hours of their lives wasted dealing with some unreadable/ unusable/ ridiculous message from the product of an app developer’s lousy imagination. Nor are they likely to be spending a lot of money for the privilege. The other side of the equation is getting these software-based jokes to work with your own business software, a hobby in itself.

Avoiding the duds has become a major issue for business telephone systems, as much for survival purposes as anything else.

There are a few quick ways of saving a lot of time and tearing out hair when looking for apps:

Check out Google, Microsoft and Apple reviews. Look for any information about dysfunctional features, cost, support issues or any indication that the review writers have had specific relevant experiences, positive or negative.

1)  Forget anything which doesn’t have a “test drive” option. Why wouldn’t the developer allow people to check out the app for themselves? Not encouraging, and not impressive.

2)  Freebies can be taken or left. The freebie apps are a very mixed bag. They’re like the bargain bin at a shop. Some are used as a promotional method to introduce users to the app developer’s other products. That’s a reasonable approach, and at least plausible as a marketing effort. The others are a lot less likely to do much but sit on your phone system not working and becoming more obsolete by the second.

3) Check for design notes regarding compatibility with business software. If your phone is your office, you don’t need space being taken up by do-nothing, non-transferable apps holding your valuable business data.

4) File sharing systems. The benchmark standard is Dropbox, but there are quite a few others. Compare these things with Dropbox, which is able to work with file systems and do its job properly. Check out file sizes, too, because some of these things aren’t even as good as email attachments.

If an app can do what it claims to be able to do and work well with your business systems, grab it. Otherwise, forget it.