A company with 1–500 employees uses an average of 172 apps on a regular basis, and that number rises to 255 for companies with 501–2,500 employees, according to Zylo’s 2023 SaaS Management Index.
The cost of buying point solutions for many individual apps adds up fast— without guaranteeing everything you want or need.
“A point solution works when you’re doing generic work—but you’re still buying something for a single thing,” says Daniella Burns, Director of Product Management at Nintex. “Many organizations are now asking, ‘Do we really need to pay individually and manage security and overhead for all these tools?”
The answer is no … but the alternative isn’t always clear. Here are 14 use cases for building internal apps for employee productivity, marketing and sales, customer success, and employee onboarding.
Internal apps for employee productivity
According to McKinsey, more than half of employees are relatively unproductive. Lost productivity means sunk labor costs and lower organizational efficiency.
It’s no surprise, then, that increasing productivity is the main driver for using or building internal apps. That’s why we’re starting with employee productivity—it’s a top goal across functions like sales and marketing, customer success, and HR. (More on those later.)
To boost productivity, you might create apps to accurately track time and tasks, monitor performance metrics, or locate essential info in your client relationship management (CRM) platform. And you’ll likely see additional benefits, from improved communication to faster decision-making.
Let’s look at a few examples of companies building and using employee productivity apps:
1. Faster access to tools and data
IT and services company Fujitsu aimed to help a significant insurance company create a unified user experience (UX) to enhance its customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Using Nintex App Dev, Fujitsu built a comprehensive underwriting desktop app to manage the company’s new clients and renewals. Now, users can quickly access what they need to renew policies, create call reports, and generate cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Adoption is up 50%, development time is down 70%, and overall costs fell by up to 35%.
2. Improved workplace productivity
In 2024, software company Adobe released its Acrobat AI Assistant to help knowledge workers save time and energy in their jobs. The app helps enterprise employees quickly surface data and generate text for emails, reports, blogs, presentations, and other documents.
For example, legal compliance teams can use it to summarize and communicate the impact of pending regulations, and research and development (R&D) teams can monitor industry trends to inform product innovation. The result is less time spent searching and writing and more time on strategic work.
3. Speed up approval processes with consistency
One of Britain’s leading train leasing companies, Angel Trains, has continued to invest heavily in train modernization programs. Since its foundation in 1994, the company has invested £5 billion in new trains and refurbishments of existing rolling stock. As a result, the company frequently needs to issue and approve purchase orders and contracts with values that exceed £100,000.
With Nintex App Dev, Angel Trains has improved its financial approvals process, completing orders 25% faster, allowing for other processes across the business to be automated by providing accurate and efficient internal financial approvals app.
Internal apps for sales and marketing
Sales and marketing are essential functions at any company—they attract leads, drive revenue, and build brand recognition.
With internal apps, you free up your sales and marketing teams to focus on strategic tasks that move your business forward. These apps can provide more efficient visibility into activity across RevOps, partner portals, and more.
You might create an app to monitor campaign performance, track leads, analyze organic traffic, or register deals—leading to benefits like faster response times, increased conversions, and improved forecasting.
Here are five sales and marketing examples to inspire you:
4. Saving on costs and expediting go-to-market strategy
When fiber optics manufacturer AFL needed to take an innovative approach to tackling the challenges of their configure, price, and quote processes (CPQ), they turned to Nintex App Dev to manage around 100,000 quotable products and transition seamlessly into a custom-tailored system using App Dev on Salesforce.
Without the hassle of coding, the process also saved the company $1 million on purchasing a new CPQ solution, including eliminating around $150,000 per year in licensing fees and ultimately expediting their go-to-market strategy by 79% with the user-friendly and efficient CPQ built to scale.
5. Improved customer relationship management
As cloud communications company Vonage grew, they acquired new companies and tools, leading to siloed datasets and manual data entry. Plus, their teams lacked 100%
visibility into customer data profiles.
With the help of Salesforce apps, Vonage created an automated communication hub in Slack, connected data from diverse systems with a unique identifier, simplified quote creation and management, and consolidated data into a unified view. Now, the company can continue to scale—and its marketing and sales teams have a better understanding of their customers and improved collaboration methods.
6. A better sales experience
ModularWalls, Australia’s leading manufacturer of modular walls and fences, realized that their salespeople struggled to walk prospects through technical specifications on job sites without visual aids. They needed a tool to improve their reps’ presentations and help customers make an informed purchase decision.
The company turned to Nintex App Dev to build a unique configure/price/quote (CPQ) tool that shows customers what their wall or fence would look like before even talking to a rep. The Modular Walls Quick Quote Calculator helps customers determine how much coverage they need, what materials would work best, how tall the fence should be, and what local regulations to consider—all with an impressive user experience that’s a differentiator in the construction industry.
7. Building a better brand to attract top talent
Establishing a strong and attractive employer brand is critical to stand out among competitors and retain top talent. For Corteva Agriscience, once a division with DowDuPont, the company faced the challenge of re-branding and creating a new identity when it became a standalone entity in 2019.
To help build a compelling brand to attract candidates quickly and effectively, Corteva developed a custom application process that enhanced the overall job application experience and solidified its reputation as a leading employer in the health and life sciences industry.
8. Increased visibility and reporting
Talkdesk, a San Francisco-based technology company, found that spreadsheets and shared drives were no longer sufficient as data storage solutions as they scaled. They needed a custom professional services app that would live in Salesforce and bring together quantitative and qualitative pre-sales data in one place.
Working with Nintex, the company developed an accessible app that lets stakeholders run detailed reports to tailor product and sales plans. Nintex accelerated the app dev process while helping Talkdesk meet technical requirements. The app has been strongly adopted by the pre-sale team and sets the stage for future process optimization.
“This new app represented a major process change affecting hundreds of people, but we saw very little pushback. People just started using it and were really impressed by the speed of automation.”
–Mike Klas, Global Director of Services at Talkdesk
Internal apps for customer success (CS)
According to the Gainsight Customer Success Index North America 2023, 98% of companies plan to maintain their investment in customer success. They recognize the power of customer success as a driver of revenue, advocacy, and expansion.
One good place to invest those dollars is internal app development. For example, you might create internal apps to monitor customer satisfaction, create product usage dashboards, or assign action items for renewals.
With apps like these, you help your CS team in myriad ways, improving issue prioritization, increasing their understanding of churn risk, providing a more comprehensive view of the customer lifecycle, and building more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Here are three effective customer success use cases:
9. Better time tracking and accessibility
The VA aims to provide excellent services to America’s veterans, but internally, the organization struggled with an employee time tracking app—the Work and Time Reporting System (WATRS). They needed a modern solution to improve the user experience and comply with disability regulations like Section 508.
With Nintex, the VA overhauled its system, addressing numerous usability and compliance issues. In just six months, they built and deployed a new app that did just that, taking big steps toward a more inclusive and efficient workplace.
10. More accessible insights
For process management platform Nintex, providing solid customer support is a primary
goal. With that in mind, they created Nintex Customer Central (NCC) to help customers solve process problems, find technical issues, advance their skills, and connect with peers and experts.
As a legacy product, the Nintex team saw an opportunity to rebuild the app with Nintex App Dev to make it more user-friendly and easier to collect reliable data and insights.
That’s right—even Nintex uses Nintex to improve productivity and efficiency.
11. Faster claims processing and report creation
A U.S.-based insurance company turned to EVNE Dev because manual work was slow and caused errors in client settlements and insurance reports. They wanted a
new automated system to improve data collection and accuracy and streamline the claims experience.
EVNE Dev’s team built a custom, AI-powered accident reporting solution that lets claim representatives and drivers enter information digitally instead of manually at the scene. The result? The client reduced the time required to create settlements by 30% and decreased errors in insurance reports by 60%.
Internal apps for human resources or people management
Legacy human resources (HR) systems often make it harder for users to access data. Internal apps can make HR data more visible, central, and automated for team members who need document generation, authorized signatures, and critical onboarding resources.
You can create internal apps for use cases ranging from customer, employee, and partner onboarding to integrating data into a centralized platform for increased visibility. The results? Smoother experiences, faster time to value, easier document generation, and more.
Here are three use cases for improving HR or people management processes with internal apps:
12. More efficient client onboarding
RE Cost Seg allows real estate owners to save money on taxes through cost segregation. As they scaled, the company faced two challenges—efficiently managing engineering reports and improving interactions with clients and reporting engineers.
With no-code tool Noloco, RE Cost Seg integrated their existing Airtable base to create a seamless file request system. They also built an app that streamlined the sales team’s processes while syncing their data with their existing Airtable base. This made the client onboarding process faster while improving overall customer satisfaction rates.
13. Improved job application experienced
Establishing a strong brand can help you recruit and retain more employees. Corteva Agriscience, once a division of DowDuPont, found they not only needed to develop an independent identity—but build a candidate experience from scratch.
Corteva used Nintex App Dev to help them create a professional and compelling job application process. Their new and improved application flow has reduced job application abandonment rates by enhancing the UX and reducing completion time. It’s also helped them establish themselves as a world-class employer brand.
14. Easier staff onboarding
Employee onboarding can quickly drain HR’s time and resources at a mid-market org, especially when there’s a high turnover rate. An internal app can ease the pain and create an efficient, customized process for onboarding.
Using a solution like Microsoft PowerApps for simple mobile apps or Nintex App Dev for
apps of any size, you can simplify tasks like adding new employees, sending notifications, or managing attendance.
Pro tip: Explore Nintex’s entire platform of complementary tools to streamline and automate the end-to-end employee onboarding experience. You can map the onboarding process to find opportunities for optimization, generate starter forms, and automatically send forms for approval. You’ll fast-track your onboarding across departments so your new hires can settle into their new jobs—and get to work—faster.
Build better internal apps with Nintex
With so many ways to use internal apps to boost productivity, improve satisfaction, cut costs, and generate revenue, turning to an app dev platform just makes sense.
Whether you want to increase employee productivity and efficiency across the board—or make specific improvements in sales and marketing, customer success, or human resources—Nintex can help.
Want to quickly deliver apps that people love to use? You can, with Nintex Application Development capabilities.
