If you are a business owner, you may be on the lookout for the very best software options for your company. Many choose the standard 'off the shelf' software out of ease and convenience. But unfortunately, this won't always fulfil what you're looking to achieve.

Why? Because your business is unique. This is the reason your products and services stand out from the crowd. An off-the-shelf solution that is mass-produced for everyone is not always the answer on its own. Bespoke software comes in many forms and can help you meet the exclusive objectives of your business or industry.

There are many ways that bespoke software can transform your processes to meet the rising expectations of your customers. For example, bespoke integration into content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and eCommerce sales systems can give your off the shelf software a whole new lease of life.

Bespoke software enables businesses to think differently and stand out in a crowded market by being a leader rather than a follower. Delivering new features that your customers will love will also give you an advantage over others in your industry. The software can be the glue between your systems or can be your systems.

Competitive advantage

From financial management to task sharing, there are many different commercial off the shelf software types to purchase. While 'off the shelf' can fulfil the vast majority of your needs, there will still be some that will be missed out. Often that missing part is the part that makes your business special in your market.

For most businesses, this means you'll still need to spend time manually completing tasks, which could be better spent elsewhere. In comparison, bespoke software will take into consideration every one of your needs, so manual tasks are minimised.

McDonald's, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Google are all perfect examples of companies that lead their industry with custom-made software. But these same game-changing abilities are now affordable to businesses outside of Silicon Valley too. With the right support partner in place, bespoke software can make or save you money, depending on your unique goals.

Evolving your business systems

A key feature of bespoke application software is that it can quickly adapt to changes within the business. You will have full control of managing any upcoming improvements and updates and modify certain aspects as and when you need them.

By retiring time-consuming and repetitive tasks, your teams can concentrate on other aspects of your business and providing value. Bespoke software also unlocks the ability to embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Modifying and adapting the software with the changing digital landscape is a competitive advantage on its own.

Similarly, deliverables and schedules can be adapted along the way to make the experience better for you and your clients. An off the shelf product can feel like you are trying to put a round peg in a square hole. By contrast, bespoke software evolves to improve the future of the business, as well as the present.

Expert advice on-hand

When you purchase off the shelf software, you typically embark on a journey of discovery. Often there is usually little or no on-hand assistance from the developer. You're more likely to find a generic FAQ page and template responses than dedicated assistance, or advice or a hefty professional services bill on top of the cost of the software. Learning that your new shiny off the shelf solution can’t manage essential tasks or critical processes can be time-consuming and embarrassing.

Your business development strategy is at the heart of everything you do. This is where your journey should begin, and your success will be affected by the support partners that you take with you.

Bespoke software providers such as Full Fat Things have professionals on hand to give honest and open advice at the very start of the project. They'll give you solutions you haven't yet thought about which are essential in the early stages of the set-up process, rather than having to make crucial adjustments along the way.

Remove data silos with bespoke integration

Data silos and inconsistent processes are the reason why so many organisations have low business information and analytics maturity. Businesses of all sizes will understand the challenges of managing different data streams and silos. But bespoke integration can turn your biggest headache into an opportunity.

The beauty of bespoke software is the transformative qualities that it can bring into your existing CRM, ERP, and CMS. In our experience, the integration between off the shelf and bespoke software gives businesses the special sauce required to meet their unique requirements.

With the right technical expertise, you can finally eradicate data silos. At Full Fat Things, we enable teams to unlock valuable insights from tools such as Salesforce, Infor, and SAP. We see our role as the final piece of the jigsaw that finally brings every aspect of your business together.

By uniting all aspects of your systems, you can improve efficiency, streamline processes, and create a unique customer experience.

Thriving in the experience economy

Your products and services are no longer enough to guarantee the loyalty of your customers. An incredible 89% of companies now compete on the basis of customer experience, which was only 36% in 2010. How will your company adapt to these changes?

Before even thinking about technology or software, we understand that you need to unlock new capabilities, audiences, and opportunities with your customers at the heart of everything.

Your evolving business goals and vision can be brought to life by implementing a bespoke solution that seamlessly connects everything together. With the right approach, the end result is a friction-free business for both you and your customers.

Custom, bespoke, and tailor-made software allows companies of all sizes to define its own functionality and user experience. In a digital age of disruption, it also allows you to move away from conventional software that was built for yesterday's customer rather than a mobile-first world.

Choosing the right support partner

The support partner of choice will often determine the success of leveraging technology to bring your vision to life that you choose. From concept to completion, you will need a team by your side to deliver a solution tailored to the requirements of your organisation.

The days where a traditional software company walks off into the sunset never to be seen again after go-live are thankfully disappearing. In a digital world of continuous change, businesses need a long-term partner for success that they can trust.

Whereas traditional software serves a purpose, it seldom helps you react quickly to competitor product innovations or changes in customer behaviour. Innovation is a journey, not a destination, and one of the main reasons that our customers continue to innovate for their customers with our teams every month, not just for one project.

In a digital age where the speed of exponential change continues to move at breakneck speed, customer expectations will continue to rise. The actionable insights required to delight your audience can be unlocked by building bridges to your disparate data sources.

You already have the right software and a mountain of data. All you need is a support partner with the required technical expertise to bring it all together. Does this sound familiar? 

At Full Fat Things, we always recommend using ‘personas’ for customer projects. For the uninitiated, this might seem like a lot of bother. So I thought I’d explain what they are, why we use them and how you can get the most out of them.

Why personas are worth it

Before I get started, I’m not going to claim we invented personas. Instead, I’m writing this because I think the concept is brilliant – if used properly.

In any case, the notion of personas has been around way longer than Full Fat Things. According to Wikipedia, the first mention of ‘user personas’ was back in the 1980s. But I suspect people may have been using something similar for even longer.

What I’m more sure about is that the growth in popularity of personas has risen pretty much in parallel with that of the Internet. If you think about it, with ever more goods and services being purchased remotely, it makes sense to have a picture of your customers in mind. But where personas really come into their own is in clarifying that image for everyone in your company and provide enough detail to make sensible, actionable decisions.

What are personas?

When we pitch for software development work, one of the things we always say is that “We serve people”. Of course, pretty much every organisation serves people, either directly or indirectly. But for larger companies it’s almost impossible to know every single one of your customers well enough to feed that into your development work. The upshot of this is the need to generalise to some extent.

Personas allow you to do this in a helpful way by encapsulating all you need to know about your customers and presenting this as the characteristics of a set of fictional characters. That’s because it’s far easier to consider whether a product is going to be attractive to 34-year-old teacher Joe Bloggs and 48-year-old bus driver Mary Smith than to an audience that’s simply described as having a wide age range, a long list of job titles and a vague income bracket.

Smaller organisations can benefit from personas too. They can provide a touchstone for development that’s independent of any current customer and let you think about the customers you want as well as the ones you’ve already got.

When you create and share personas, your staff can more readily empathise with the people they’re serving. It becomes much easier to answer the questions: “What does the customer need?” and “What does the customer want?”

When should we use them?

Personas aren’t only useful at the start of a project. When we work with clients, we’ll encourage you to keep referring back to them as they’ll help you to prioritise what should be developed next. And you can keep using them after development is complete.

Also, personas aren’t static. If it makes sense to do so, they can be tweaked as together we learn more. This way they live and breathe, adding even more value to the user stories we’ll build and refer to throughout the project’s lifetime.

You can create personas for your staff as well. If they’re involved in serving customers, this is a good way to make sure their goals and challenges are taken into account too.

How do I create personas for my business?

If there’s one thing I know about personas, it’s that they only help if they contain a lot of detail. If you want to understand the expectations, concerns and motivations of your customers, you need to know far more than just their ages and job titles.

And there’s no point in creating personas if they don’t represent all your customers. That means doing proper research. This could be a mix of interviews, workshops and surveys. You can also use data collected from your existing applications. (We can help with any of this – we’ve done it lots of times, so it may be faster and more cost effective to use us. But if you’d prefer to do it yourself, let us know and we can offer guidance if it helps.)

If all of this sounds excessive, bear in mind that you can use these personas across your organisation and not just for a single project. They should become a cornerstone of your business moving forward, so they’ll provide value for a long time.

What do I need to know?

You’ll have to excuse me for stating the obvious, but just to be clear, the attributes you need to understand will vary according to the services and/or products you’re providing. What’s sometimes less obvious is you’ll be researching a mix of personal and professional details.

Among the ones we think you should consider compiling are: age, gender, marital and family status education and career overviews job title, salary, responsibilities where they get their information from individual goals, motivations, challenges and needs.

If it’s relevant, you might also want to capture information such as: company sector, products/services, turnover organisational challenges, reporting line their approach to work and managing their team.

How do I turn all this into personas?

Once you have your research data, you’ll need to condense it by looking for themes and characteristics. Remember, these need to be relevant to both your organisation and the application in question.

Next, do some brainstorming to organise all of this into groups that each represent a subset of target customers. You’ll then need to refine and prioritise the information so that you can write a description of a fictional person who encapsulates all you’ve learned about each group. And finally, it's most effective if you present it in a way that’s easy to read and absorb.

User persona examples

Generally I suggest you aim for up to five personas as there is no single definitive user persona who will represent everyone you’re targeting. And personas won’t be the same for every organisation, even in the same sector.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example. Say you were providing technical services to medium-to-large companies, here are some personas you might come up with.

First is Chief Technical Officer Dave who is 47, married with two children and commutes to London where he has overall responsibility for the IT of a £150 million turnover company. He is a risk taker but is under pressure to minimise costs. Then there’s Sam, who’s the new Head of Marketing for a £50 million turnover company based in the Midlands. He is on the lookout for new products and services to enhance the customer experience, which he has quickly identified as needing improvement. And finally there’s managing director Priya, who is also married with two children and commutes to offices in London and Berkshire. She is under pressure to maximise profits for shareholders of her £90 million turnover company and has to make tough decisions regarding budgets. They all use LinkedIn and Twitter, plus a variety of other social media and resources for work and leisure.

Ultimately, you’ll want something more detailed than this to make them really useful. For each one therefore, you should end up with something along the lines of:

• name, job title, responsibilities and the group of users they represent
• demographics including age and education
• the environment they’re working or operating in
• details relating specifically to your application, such as goals, tasks, when and where they’ll be accessing it, and the competition.

Fleshing this out with a photo and a quote really helps to bring personas to life and make them more relatable for everyone who uses them.

And then what?

You’ve created personas to help you align development with your users’ needs. The next step is that everyone involved needs to know what they are and why they matter. I really want to emphasise here how important it is to spend time and effort on this stage. Don’t just send them out via email. Talk to people, answer questions, explain why they’re valuable and how they can use them.

Once you’ve distributed them to your team(s), we at Full Fat Things can use them when we’re writing user stories, which in turn define what should happen at each step of your application – from the users’ point of view.

Then, as development continues, you and your team can use the personas to decide how to prioritise what to develop next.

Personas can also help your teams understand how different parts of the business serve customers. This is where they add extra value. It’s all too easy for teams to become compartmentalised. Talking about ‘real people’ (albeit fictional) makes it much easier for staff to see how each part of the business contributes to addressing their needs.

Pitfalls to avoid

There’s no perfect way to create personas. If there was, we’d all be using the same process. But here’s my list of things to avoid if you want to get the most out of them.

Teach people how to use personas

By the time you’ve created your personas, it will seem like a logical concept – to you. But others may have no idea what to do with them. Tell them, bearing in mind their roles and targets.

Don’t make them up 

...based on what you ‘think’ you know about your customers. Compare your view with other managers and you’ll quickly uncover some variations.

Check they aren’t too general

There may be times when company-wide personas are too broad for a specific application. That’s not helpful. If you suspect this is the case, take positive action and consider creating a new subset for that project.

Don’t distribute them digitally 

...and assume people will refer to them. Often, they won’t. Find ways to present the results to everyone in person. And then provide physical versions that people can decorate their offices with.

Get buy-in from the top

If the board and senior management don’t understand what you’re doing and/or champion the idea, the trickle-down effect will soon mean others won’t bother with them either. This can be a significant challenge. Address it by explaining the benefits to the organisation. Then ask them to share their expertise by getting involved in the research.

Don’t create them in isolation

If you suddenly present them to your organisation as a done deal, you risk alienating some of your staff who either don’t understand them or don’t agree with them. And then they won’t get used. Find ways to let people know what you’re doing and contribute to their development.