For nine days, Pyxis Mobile's Mobile Productivity Blog will be publishing a series of articles providing the case for enterprise mobility, along with the technical considerations and evaluation criteria for selecting a mobile partner.
“When employees go mobile, efficiency increases 15 to 30 percent” – Diane Horton, IBM Canada’s Human Capital Management Practice Leader
As we mentioned in the last chapter, connecting with customers is not the only key to success. A successful mobile strategy allows businesses to empower employees at every level of the organization, driving productivity, efficiency, and job satisfaction. An area we think clearly exemplifies this benefit is customer service and sales. Employees who deal with customers in the field have a more meaningful interaction when enabled to access not only scheduling information but also real-time CRM and account data from their mobile devices. This gives them actionable information which helps to improve customer service and loyalty with their customers and prospects. In a fiercely competitive economy where customers are more demanding than ever, companies that unlock the full value of their sales and account management systems by making them accessible from anywhere will find themselves with a distinct and measurable advantage.
Enterprise-wide mobility can also help companies address some of the big picture trends reshaping American business. Chief among these is the rise of the mobile workforce. It’s estimated that mobile workers currently make up 35 percent of all corporate employees, a number expected to jump to over 70 percent!
Why is this happening? Well, more employees are demanding a wider range of flexibility, and this is only expected to increase as time continues. But companies don’t mind, the cost of maintaining a brick and mortar sales and marketing office will decrease or even disappear as the number of mobile employees increases. This increase has a dually beneficial effect. Not only will costs for the company go down, but productivity will go up; mobile workers put in more hours on the job. According to a recent survey of 600 employees, BlackBerry users work approximately 15 additional hours each week because they are always connected to critical business and transaction systems.
Although increased mobility in the workforce is beneficial to companies, managing it can be demanding. It can bring a whole new set of challenges:
- Facilitating collaboration among widely dispersed employees
- Managing paperwork and administrative issues
- Disseminating internal HR and benefits information
Enterprise mobility exists to mitigate these issues. A well-planned enterprise mobility strategy is the cure; it can provide a secure, reliable way to deliver crucial real time data, facilitate communication among different work groups, increase the speed at which far-flung employees can create and process contracts, purchase orders, and other documents, and create workflows that allow data from different sources to be combined and accessed in a way that makes it relevant to all employee groups.
Question: What is the biggest challenge facing your company, and how might mobility solve it?
Our next chapter will touch upon the third component that makes an enterprise mobility strategy a success.
Totally agree enterprise mobility exists to mitigate the issues above for the mobile employee. A well-planned enterprise mobility strategy is no doubt going to make your staff more efficient in the field. Real time access to information is what customers are going to expect in the near future.
Plus at the end of the day providing your employees mobile flexibility allows them to always be engaged when the client needs access to information.
Posted by: Cpollara | January 13, 2010 at 12:59 PM