Organizational success in today’s business world is achieved when employees are able to quickly and directly communicate with their clients anytime, anywhere and with any modality they wish to use (voice, e-mail, instant message, SMS, etc.). However, this is much easier said than done.
Many companies do not yet fully understand the importance of communicating with their clients or, for that matter, when and how to do it. If this simple concept could be implemented right, it could greatly enhance a company’s ability to do even more business with existing and new customers.
“Welcome to Mobility 2.0,” says Monty Ferdowsi, president of Broadcore. “Maybe Mobility 2.0 is just a buzzword these days, but nevertheless, organizations must provide mobility to their employees in order to extend the reach between employees and customers. And no, this is not just providing employees with cell phones.”
With more and more employees working from home and/or on the road, communication mobility becomes vital to productive and efficient work. But, no matter where your employees are working from, a mobile business just makes sense in today’s technological age.
Smart Business spoke with Ferdowsi about Mobility 2.0 and the benefits of having a mobile business with mobile employees.
How can an organization improve the mobility of its employees?
Well, just to simplify this a bit, there are several communication services that companies need to extend to their employees in order for them to be fully effective when they are away from their offices. For one, they have to have full access to all office resources. And, most communications can be simplified into voice and data communications. Voice communication primarily represents the telephone, and data communication primarily represents e-mail, IM and SMS.
Today’s data communication is so advanced that companies can fairly easily extend it to their mobile users. Voice communication, however, has been much more complicated as it piggybacks to an older and less robust infrastructure. Voice is still considered a critical medium for conducting business, and having voice communication seamlessly extended to mobile users is a very import part of mobilizing your employees.
In order to extend voice communications from corporate offices to remote and mobile employees, companies can procure new advanced telephony systems that will provide these capabilities or subscribe to hosted communications services that provide these capabilities without the need to invest into new voice infrastructure. Hosted communications services have become the next generation of voice communication and offer many capabilities including remote office, computer telephony integration and soft phone, which all contribute to a more robust mobility.
What are some real-world examples of mobility?
Every organization has a number of employees that must be traveling in order to generate business for the company. Outside sales staff and service personnel are good examples of this. If these professionals can be fully in touch with their customers, they can effectively increase their productivity by 20 to 40 percent a day. This can easily translate to thousands of dollars per month, per employee, as they can turn their dead times into fully productive times.
Most companies today have nice, reliable telephone systems in their corporate offices, but they could easily miss the deal of the month when the call comes in and reaches a voice-mail box. With Mobility 2.0, traveling employees can be equipped so they can easily take these types of calls no matter where they are. Again, this can turn dead time between customer visits into a productive time. Employees can effectively take care of customers as if they were sitting in their offices with access to their voice and data communications systems.
How can a company learn about and implement Mobility 2.0?
When considering extending mobility to your employees, the first step is having a good understanding of the capabilities and how to effectively implement them. A good start is to engage an experienced organization in this space to educate and consult you on the technologies, benefits and pitfalls, as well as show you how to best procure systems and services to mobilize your organizations.
Your in-house IT or your outsourced IT is a good place to start for evaluating mobility for your data communications services, and your telephone system vendor and your telephone company are a good place to start to check your options for getting your voice mobilized. There are also next-generation service providers who provide complete turnkey solutions under one umbrella, giving you advanced and fully mobilized voice and data communications solutions as a service. These hosted services are tightly integrated, eliminating multiple vendors, large initial capital investments and ongoing support and maintenance costs.
Monty Ferdowsi is the president of Broadcore. Reach him at (800) 942-4700 or [email protected]. Broadcore (www.broadcore.com) has more than 20 years of telephony experience with five years of deploying advance hosted telephony for major U.S. companies.
