May 30, 2014
Mobile is becoming the primary platform for business and customer interactions. Yet enabling your workforce takes more than just providing smartphone or tablet access to enterprise applications. Taking advantage of the engagement and productivity opportunities enterprise mobile applications bring to your business requires a robust mobile business strategy, as well as a firm understanding of both business and IT processes.
Moreover, the mobile applications you choose to enable must be laser-focused on supporting better customer interactions. When it comes to today’s always-connected customer, you only have a precious few moments to capture their attention with something meaningful — whether its on your website, with your reps out in the field, or with a call center agent. We recently launched the Guide to Mobile Engagement, which covers the six features of an effective mobile business strategy. Lets dive a little deeper into the first feature: identifying business-driven use cases.
Business driven use cases help you examine the motivations and goals of your mobile strategy, as opposed to diving right into the execution. While its easy to skip this process and just start delivering the functionality, or switching on third party apps for your teams, a focused approach is to identify and enable the right use-cases that are critical to yielding the most ROI and efficiency gains.
Here are a few steps to get started:
- Focus on Business Process(s)
Begin to identify the right use-cases for your business by putting yourself in your customers’ and employees’ shoes, as they go through their processes. Physically spend time with your stakeholders as they go about their daily tasks in order to identify the barriers and gaps in their workflows. In doing so, you can uncover opportunities that could put your company ahead of your customers’ needs.
Ask yourself:
>Do my employees have access to the information they need to own every customer moment?
>What are the discrete moments of engagement we must improve?
>Where can the unique mobile devices capabilities be used to make customer experiences and business processes better? - Make Mobility a Company-Wide Discussion
Oftentimes, marketing and sales departments have the strongest focus on best practices to engage customers. It’s integral to incorporate feedback from different departments of all levels in your organization, in addition to partners and customers, to ensure that your mobile apps stay ahead of your employees’ and customers’ needs.
Some organizations are taking it one step further by establishing Mobile Centers of Excellence (COE). Providing a constant rhythm of new ideas, setting priorities, developing business cases, and initiating joint efforts between the leaders of the organization are just a few of many benefits. - Focus on Specifics
One of the leading qualities of a mobile enterprise is the ability to distill moments of value out of everyday interactions, thereby transforming broken customer moments into extraordinary ones.
Now that you have identified your list of use cases, avoid the urge to just take everything you want to do and shove it into a single mobile app. Pinpoint the specific “moments of value” — critical points in time wherein better results or experiences can be delivered.
Successful mobile strategies embrace the idea of an “app suite,” a collection of tools that individually targeted specific workflows, as opposed to the “kitchen sink” approach of one monolithic app for everything. - Follow the ROI
Once you have a firm understanding of your process gaps through gathering specific use cases from across your organization, its time to prioritize. In our experience, the most successful apps are those that can be tied to immediate and measurable gains in productivity and customer engagement. You can even take it one step further by establishing success metrics and attaching mobile initiatives to your company’s business goals to fuel future initiatives.
Customer Spotlight: Streamlining Site Inspections with MobileBluewolf worked with a transnational company with activities in four main service and utility areas traditionally managed by public authorities: water supply and water management, waste management, energy, and transportation services. For the drivers and site inspectors within their waste management division, an important part of the job is identifying and documenting bin locations and potential hazards on-site. Through careful analysis, Bluewolf enhanced this moment of value with a customer-facing mobile application. A digital questionnaire and photo annotation capabilities helped users identify hazards quickly to capture information in real-time. Before deployment, this task was handled with paper forms and manual submission, taking up valuable driver time, while leaving room for user error and inconsistent documentation. By taking advantage of offline capability and mobile device's camera functionality, Bluewolf’s customer has increased effienciey of their field teams, is saving thousands of dollars annually, all while increasing customer engagement, and employee engagement. |
Companies are under pressure to quickly mobile-enable their applications. Yet technology is only an enabler. To get the most impact from your mobile initiatives, a robust mobile business strategy is essential. Download the Guide to Mobile Engagement to learn all six features of an effective mobile business strategy.
