Category: Business

Steve Jobs’s April 2010 prophecy of mobile devices replacing desktops and laptops as the computing devices of choice is now coming true. More people now access the internet using their mobile devices, compared to desktops or laptops. This has its effect in e-commerce as well.
M-commerce is now 34% of all ecommerce transactions, and expected to grow at 31% in 2017. Overall e-commerce is slated to grow at just 15% in the same period, meaning m-commerce is slated to grow 200% faster. Goldman Sachs estimates the total value of m-commerce at $626 billion by 2018, by which time m-commerce would account for half of all e-commerce transactions.

The reason for the surge in m-commerce is obvious. More and more people now prefer the convenience of taking out their smartphones when on the move in a commuter train or when whiling away time at the dentist’s office, rather than take time out to sit in front of a desk, wait for the laptop to boot, and get connected.

Many e-commerce players, quick to spot the trends, have come up with responsive mobile websites and rolled out native mobile apps, to facilitate the mobile-savvy customer. In fact e-tailers no longer have a choice; as 57% of customers won’t even recommend businesses with poor mobile sites, leave alone patronize it. However, most of the early adopters have also discovered merely launching mobile apps or mobile websites is not enough. It is still a fiercely competitive marketplace, and only those who go all out to facilitate the mobile customer wins.

Here are some ways to go all-out, to pamper the highly fickle mobile shopper

Leverage the Power of Simplicity.

The mobile is a consumption-focused device. Play to this strength by making it easy for the user to find what they are looking to consume. Leverage the power of simplicity through a minimalist design and a clean structure. The best apps do not require too much keyboarding or taping on menus, and makes all crucial process, be it registration, login, ordering, check-out, and payment fast and easy. Simplicity and minimalism offers a residual benefit of minimizing data traffic, and speeding up page-loads, which in turns boosts SEO.

Think like a Mobile Customer

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

Leverage the Power of Innovation

 The overriding focus of successful e-tailers is how to uniquely serve their mobile customers. They strive to make their mobile assets dynamic, through promos, deals, offers, discounts, and more. In this, they innovate to ensure their apps leverage the latest developments in technology, or to ride the latest smartphone trends. The best m-commerce apps leverage the unique capability of mobile devices, such as geo-targeting, location-based services, QR codes, and more, to deliver customized offers and deals, and other value-added services.

Integrate Mobile with Overall e-Commerce Strategy

A mobile friendly website or a native app may induce the customer to make a purchase immediately. However, for all the efforts put in by the e-tailer, there is always a possibility of sheer hardware limitations driving poor mobile experience. As such, it is important to integrate the mobile strategy with the overall e-commerce strategy, and provide a consistent experience across channels, where a customer may “capture” of the purchase on mobile and complete the transaction on a larger screen. This is even more important as 53% of customers look at products in brick and mortar store and buy online.

Tie in m-Commerce with Social Media

Mobile and social media are almost inseparable. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the likes are on the screens of nearly everyone stuck on the subway, bus, or train. Successful e-tailers who integrate their m-commerce strategy with their social efforts are able to draw in quite a number of social media visitors straight to the m-commerce site.

There is however, no one-size-fits-all solution. The best way to milk the ongoing m-commerce revolution depends on your specific business. Partnering with us to expand and enhance your mobile strategy allows you to leverage our wide experience and expertise, and is a guaranteed way to save time and improve your ROI.

In today’s hyper-connected age, with people always on the move, one would think not developing enterprises mobility solution is akin to the company shooting itself on the foot. Yet many companies hesitate to develop mobility solutions, wary as they are about misconceptions associated with it.

Here are the top six myths related to enterprise mobility solutions.

Myth # 1: Legacy Software is Too Entrenched to Displace

Legacy software is often the whipping boy for enterprises who refrain from developing mobility solutions. A key accusation is legacy software draining IT budgets, making it hard to fund new software.

The reality is that developing new mobility software doesn’t require massive investment. In fact, today’s rapidly advancing mobile solution landscape makes it possible to develop mobility solutions with little or no programming skills, with a fraction of the cost, time, and effort it takes to develop traditional solutions.

The problem comes when many enterprises try to throw in more servers as the solution to every IT problem they confront. Smart enterprises simply leverage scalable and affordable cloud-based solutions, which does not involve CAPEX costs.

Moreover, investment in mobility solutions often pays back for itself quickly, as mobility allows the company to become lean and mean, and spare the costs required to maintain legacy systems.

Myth #2: Enterprise Silos Make Mobility Solutions a Non-Starter

Most organizations that have been around for a while live with data and software silos. Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance, and other teams all use different tools, and operate disparate enterprise systems.

While data silos are indeed a drag and removing it can be game-changers for enterprise transformation, silos needn’t necessarily come in the way of developing mobility solutions. Installing a remote desktop server on the legacy system makes it easy to access data on it. If the legacy system doesn’t allow remote access, it is obsolete anyway. Also, many mobility apps can actually live with silos, and when information is required cutting across silos, there are several cost-effective analytic solutions now available that can access data from different silos and collate it in the cloud.

Myth#3: Potential Disruptions Create More Havoc than the Gains Mobility Brings

Many companies are inspired by the famous adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and refuse to dabble with mobility solution, least the upgrade disrupts what is already working. They consider the difficulty of migrating legacy business software and data, the downtime it causes to business critical processes, and the possible need to overhaul data center hardware and software. While such challenges were indeed big stumbling blocks in the past, the advancement of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions solve much of these issues. SaaS upgrades are in most cases done overnight, and does not require investment in new hardware or software.

Myth#4: Password Overload and Other Ills Breed End-User Resentment

No enterprise initiative succeeds with the support and cooperation of end-users. While enterprise mobility help end-user employees in many ways, they often raise concern about having to remember many passwords for the various enterprise apps they need to access. They forget passwords and raise tickets, dragging IT resources for account recovery.

While the concern is genuine, easy solutions are also available, most notably in the form of unified, easy single sign-on (SSO). Using SSO, a user needs to login just once, to gain access to all systems. SSO even facilitates integration with the user’s Google Account, or the credentials used to access Microsoft Office 365.

Myth #5: Inadequate Training and Support Doom Implementation

A common grouse against new solutions in general and mobility solutions in particular, is employees not getting enough training on enterprise apps to be productive.

The problem is actually misplaced, and has to do more with the design of the mobility solution than lack of training. Mobile apps are primarily meant to be easy, explicit, and self-evident. A “kitchen sink” (all-encompassing solution) mobile app, replicating the features and functionality of desktop applications rarely succeeds as it just combines the worst of both worlds. The ideal enterprise mobile apps rather contain just a few key functions, focusing on a specific process, and come with limited navigational choices and simple UX, primed for quick access.

Lopez Research Enterprise Mobility Benchmark estimate 60% of companies allowing BYOD, meaning employees would be familiar with device in the first place.

Myth #6: Enterprise Mobility Solutions are a Security Nightmare.

About one in every three companies had their sensitive data compromised through lost or stolen devices. To counter such damning statistics, most enterprises take inspiration from the adage “If you are not there to be hit, you cannot be hit,” and limit mobile access.

Security risks associated with mobility software are real, but also blown out of proportion. A big majority of the victims are either careless, or the company had weak security standards in the first place. Making risk management a key focus within the overall mobility strategy, and deploying effective mobile device management protocols, in combination with advanced encryption, modern authentication mechanisms, and even analytics mitigate most risks, and make mobility solution as safe as on-premises software.

Enterprises are waking up to the need to embarking on a sound mobility strategy, dispelling the myths associated with mobility. Lopez Research Enterprise Mobility Benchmark reveals 68% of companies ranking mobile-enabling the business as a top concern for 2015, a concern surpassed only by securing corporate data, and more than half of the companies planning to build 10 or more enterprise mobile apps in 2016.

Get in touch with us to fine tune your mobile strategy and develop state of the art mobile apps. Our cutting-edge enterprise mobility solutions not just enable your workforce to access much needed critical information anytime and anywhere, but also increase productivity and efficiency, and help you streamline your processes towards facilitating the customer.

Work related injuries account for about $250 million in the United States, across several industries. And out of this, about 20% of them have been found to be lower back injuries. As a matter of fact, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, back injuries accounted for a major number of lost employee work days.

Most organizations do know the importance of occupational health and safety practices, yet a lot of them still struggle to maintain it. Even though there are a number of systems available for it, organizations find it hard to decide the effectiveness of one over the other.

This is Where Wearable or Wearable Technology can Help.

Injuries can happen by chance, and sometimes they are unavoidable, like an accidental slip, or fall. Most other times though, one of the major causes of injuries is a lack of proper technique in performing a job. For instance, in the case of loading and unloading, often asymmetrical loading leads to injuries.

Wearables can help in this regard, by keeping track of and recording every single step taken, or move made, or turn or twist and promptly send back a report stating exactly where the workers pose a possibility for injury due to poor movements.

How Wearables can Help Improve Workplace Safety

Wearable technology has become so sophisticated these days that they can accurately measure human movements and postures like never before. Thus they are capable of providing companies with prompt, objective data that can be easily interpreted and turned into effective results.

Wearable technology makes use of certain small sensors that can be placed on the workers, as they go about their daily work routines. These sensors are capable of providing live data regarding their movements, which can be accompanied with high-definition videos that can help accurately single out the risk areas easily. Repeated problematic movements can be identified as a possibility of injury. Alternatively, if the worker hasn’t made any movement for a particular amount of time, the system can automatically trigger an alert to co-workers, to act on instantly.

For example, VINCI, a global construction company in the UK, actually implemented wearables in their workplace. They placed sensors on their brick-laying workers to collect real-time objective data, which resulted in lesser risks of lower back injury and even increased productivity and efficiency. Some of the detailed results were:

• Upto 85% reduction in time spent doing work involving a more than 20 degrees back bending
• An 84% reduction in lower back muscle activation
• A 17% increase in productivity, in terms of bricks per minute
• A 70% reduction in repetitive higher risk associated movements

GPS in Wearable to Ensure Technician and Client Safety

Tracking and monitoring technologies integrated to wearables ensure remote technicians remain safe. ReachOut, for example, helps integrate a right mix of mobile devices and wearable technology with location tracking capabilities. This provides a comprehensive in-the-field safety for technicians and allows clients to tackle tricky “lone worker” problems, no matter how remote the technician’s location.

To support the above facts, the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London has found that the productivity of people using wearables has increased by 8.5%

There are many more cases where wearable technologies can be used to improve workplace safety. For example, several Australian engineers have developed certain “patches” that are programmed to detect toxic gases and UV radiation, which can immensely help workers in the chemical manufacturing industry.

Another instance is in Rio Tinto, where their coal mine truck drivers use a certain device that resembles a baseball hat, to measure brainwaves in order to keep a check on and avoid fatigue-related problems.

Thus, it is evident that wearable technologies can do more than just reduce work injuries.

On a technical note, aside from the fact that work injuries affect productivity and efficiency, unsafe work environments can also increase the insurance costs incurred by a company. Moreover, hazardous environments, without possible safety precautions, can affect employee morale in a huge way, and in turn, reduce employee retention rates.
Hence, it is in the best interest of every organization to invest in improving the safety of workers, and reducing the risks of injuries. Wearables are capable of providing this much-needed safety, by carefully monitoring and comprehending human movements as well as other environmental factors, thereby helping to maintain an optimum level of health for them and the overall business.

In Field Service industry, where the technicians are face to face with customers everyday, good operational efficiency, productive staff, and effective resource management are all interconnected and are important aspects of the business. Businesses should carefully measure all these areas that indicate the health of their field service. Data and analytics thus recorded, needs to be evaluated to drive more informed business decisions. So, how do you measure these to drive more insights from it?

This photo-blog lists five unique field service power metrics to identify and monitor your company’s performance.

For how long have you been in the field service industry? For a considerably long time I’m assuming.

In that case, you might have a fairly clear idea of where customer expectations are headed. You might even have gone over some of the overwhelming numbers on the level of service expected from providers like you, in the coming years.

If you haven’t already, well, according to a report by the American Express, about 35% of customers believe that companies who provide “excellent customer service” have “earned their business” and about 25% of them were found to place a high value on excellent customer service. For more interesting facts on this, read Is Your Business Ready for the Next Generation of Customer Service?

In our previous blog, we had discussed the importance of being proactive in field service and how much of a positive impact it can have in your business.
So now that you know that it is indeed going to be a matter of survival for you in the near future, here we have some pointers for you to get started on the major shift.

First off, you need to know that it doesn’t have to be an expensive or time-consuming process. You are simply putting your customers first, as the bottom line of your proactive strategy. And we all know, it will be beneficial to your business, without a doubt.

Secondly, you need to make a few changes in your “online presence”.

Increase your availability: This does not mean just leaving a contact number on your website and addressing issues as and when they come. It means you should make yourself completely available to be contacted by your customers across a number of channels apart from your website, like email, phone, and most importantly, the social media. This makes it possible for customers to contact you whenever they want and through the channel of their choice, making your service much more effective.

Provide the basic help: This means that you would be allowing your customers to help themselves on small issues. You can do that by putting up an an FAQ page on your website or by providing a step-by-step guide on how customers can fix certain small issues themselves. More like a DIY guide. This in a way empowers them, which can work to your advantage ultimately.

Now let’s get into the steps:

Engage in the Conversations about you on Social Media

Let’s face it. Whether you like it or not, your customers are going to talk about you, either in private or through the social media (which is the case oftentimes). Now, when they do talk about you on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, you need to pay attention and see it as an opportunity for you to delight your customers, regardless of whether the conversation is in a good context or a bad context. Engage in those conversations and try addressing more of your customers’ needs.

For example, Morton’s Steakhouse, one of the best steak restaurants in the world, found on their Twitter feed that one of their customers – a popular blogger, Peter Shankman had mentioned them in his tweet, suggesting they deliver a steak to him when he landed at the airport.
And believe it or not, waiting for him at the airport was a Morton’s employee, with his steak!

That’s the kind of service that delights customers.
This is how you can possibly address positive comments or just wiggle your way into delighting your customers through random comments as well.

As for negative comments or complaints, you could respond by apologising first and then go on to explaining how or what you can do to fix the issue.

Ask for feedback and make sure everything is ok

Feedback is by far one of the most effective and simple ways to get to know your customers better and to understand exactly what they want. It is only when you know what they want, that you can serve them better. And checking in every once in a while can not only ensure that things are alright but also allow you to identify the areas where you need to work on and take steps to correct them before your customers start feeling dissatisfied.

For this purpose, here are some things you could do:

• Have an easy-to-fill feedback form on your website
• Send across simple surveys to your customers. You can easily create surveys, manage them as well as get useful insights from the responses using simple survey tools or applications.
• Go through and analyze your customer service tickets to address some of the most common questions or needs
• You can even ask your customers personally, or interview your customers about what they think of your services and how you could further help them

Admit Mistakes as Early as Possible

The age old saying “Honesty is the best policy” holds good in business too. If you’ve made a mistake or if there is an issue that could cause an inconvenience to your customers, it is always better to let them know of it, well beforehand.
It is not a good idea to have them find it out when they were probably relying on your good service at that point in time.
For example, if you’ve shipped a product or placed an order for a service, a day later than promised, you need to let them know through an email or a phone call, rather than keep them waiting in ignorance.
If you have a software upgrade scheduled, you need to inform your customers about the upgrade well beforehand, so that they can be prepared and don’t end up being unable to access the information they need, when they need it.

Reward your Customers as a ‘Thank-You’ for their Support

Rewarding is one of the most effective ways to build customer loyalty, above customer satisfaction. In fact, rewards and offers are the second and third best ways to increase customer loyalty, the first being excellent service of course.

Proactive rewards like discounts in between purchases or special offers to fix issues that the customers probably didn’t even know they had are good examples.

You could also offer discounts or refunds in cases where customers are not happy when you’ve made a mistake and have acknowledged it too.

Sending your long-term customers some discounts, a little ahead of their subscription renewal, in the form of a reminder is also a good way to thank your customers and make sure they stay.

These are some of the ways in which you could get started on shifting to your proactive service strategy. Once you get started, you could probably find more ways and turn it into more of a habit. That way, you not only dodge the chances of any risk but also build your customer base and goodwill. In no time, you will be able to stay ahead in the competition and be a leader in the field service industry.

What seemed to be a far-fetched idea or an unclear, undefined entity, a few years ago, is what is ruling the world of business today. Enterprise mobility.
People are all for the concept of “bringing their own devices” at their workplaces these days. More than 60% of workers have access to their company data or work through their smartphones and tablets. Interestingly, only about a third of business enterprises have any kind of BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) management strategy in place.
“People are bringing their own devices, but in many cases, they and their companies are not taking care of those devices and the applications on them appropriately.”, says Richard Absalom, consumer impact technology analyst at Ovum.

It is very important to have a proper Enterprise Mobility Management strategy for every organization, especially since most of them are spending a pretty significant amount on mobility.
Here is what you can do to better manage enterprise mobility.

Involving Everyone

Any BYOD policy has to be developed with inputs from all over the organization. Driven by the CIO, BYOD management efforts should involve everyone from developers to users to the IT team. Even the human resource and legal departments have to be included. As it means an entire culture change in the organization, it necessitates the need for everyone to be on the same page, about what can and cannot be accessed over personal devices.

Smartphone Technologies

The use of mobile devices automatically implies the use of various technologies offered by them such as Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, cameras, audio recorders and other sensors. Widespread use of such technologies across the organization may cause loss of data and even loss of important intellectual property to be looming concerns. Imagine the consequences of loss of an in-house video of an application’s development processes! Worse yet, are the legal implications of the same, or of other videos involving the organization’s officials in compromising positions. Hence, BYOD policies should be formulated after taking into consideration these aspects as well.

An Exit or Loss Policy

While devising BYOD policies, something that people generally tend to miss out, is an exit strategy. When an employee in any department of an organization leaves, he will be carrying a lot of information concerning his department on his smartphone, with him. This is a huge loss for the organization.

“When an employee leaves, say in sales, and they take all of the contacts on their personal phone, that is a big corporate asset that goes missing.”- Absalom

Hence, you need to develop appropriate theft, loss as well as exit policies. Along with technical issues you need to raise the security stakes. You need to find a balance with all these features and risks, so as to protect your employees’ personal information as well as your business reputation.

Insecure WiFi

Usage of insecure Wifi networks might need separate provisions in a BYOD policy since their security measures are very limited. For example, some WiFi networks may be labeled as “off-limits” on the basis of security alerts. Devices used in an enterprise should be protected against possible loss of data and attacks. An organization has to make sure that all the personal devices are well in line with the enterprise security standards. Encryption and access control are ways in which valuable corporate data residing on any device can be protected.

User Credentials

Credentials for users, such as usernames and passwords, need to be created securely with utmost care. Credentials which may be sufficient for certain kinds of applications may not be suitable for other kinds of applications that need more security. Short number strings for example,while may be appropriate authentication for a user on game leaderboards and scoreboards, they won’t be enough for a social networking application.

All of these practices call for crisp and clear policy guidelines. Their compliance needs to be made mandatory as well. You need to make sure that all your employees are well aware of the rules regarding joining, leaving or altering their role or participation in a BYOD initiative. Signatures on policy agreements need to be made compulsory. Absalom also said that it would be good to have all employees agree to legally upholding their policies and to getting their devices locked on events of it being stolen, lost or compromised in any way.
Hence, if well managed, enterprise mobility can be the best thing that ever happened to your business. Keep the above pointers in mind, embrace mobility and manage it efficiently.

How much attention do you pay to your website?
Not so much?

Then it is high time you gave your website it’s due attention, because what you are missing out on, is probably one of the biggest drivers of B2B sales for your business!

That’s right! Your website has way more impact on your business, than you give it credit for.
But hey, you are not alone. Many businesses actually underestimate the potential of their websites, and their influence on B2B sales. Most of them just consider their websites to be just an online brochure to showcase their products and services. Well, the ones that do have a website of their own that is!

There are many businesses that don’t even have an online presence!

Why does your business need a website?

Your website becomes the face of your business in the online world. It becomes your online sales representative, your means of personalization and one of the most effective ways to reach out to your customers. (More on this in a little while)
Hence, it also means that having a rigid and impersonal website, which gives rather generic responses to users’ needs would turn out to be just as good as not having a website. I mean, would you rather be online and be happy and grateful for a few small leads, or do you want to step up and win bigger customers, and gain more credibility through a personalized approach?

So here is what a website can do for your business:

Your Own Online Sales Representative

As mentioned before, your website can be the one force that brings you more sales. You get to have your own personal sales representative online. If you talk and engage with your visitors in the right way, you can have customers knocking at your door in no time.
However, the way you communicate with your customers through your website can influence the visitors in a great way. Visitors, who are especially business representatives like yourself, do not have the time to tolerate impersonal website pages with extremely sales-oriented and formal content. What they want, is a more personal and approachable site. It is almost like they want their own personal online consultant or a problem solver in a website. You need to be their go-to expert, who can talk to them personally.
It is not a cakewalk though. Here are some tips, for you to get started:

• Problem-oriented content – Instead of providing straight up sales content for your products and services offer more engaging content, along with insights based on actual problems faced by customers and market research data.
• Show proficiency – You can backup all your products and services pages with detailed case studies and whitepapers, to accentuate your relevant experience as well as your proficiency in solving customer’s problems.
• Offer personalized content – Your website visitors are probably going through many other more websites, and have no reason to remember what you are or what you do. Give them a reason to remember you by giving them personalized and relevant content. Show them that you remember them and that you care about them.

Now there are some website nitty-gritties that you can look into too, for personalization.

Personalization

The idea is to get your visitors to feel that you are offering a solution to their problem, rather than pushing or imposing your agenda. You can choose one of several ways to personalize your content.

• Ascribed personalization – where you observe and analyse your prospect’s behaviour, and recommend content like articles and products, based on their search history or browsing history.
• Elective personalization – wherein, you ask your prospects to identify themselves by choosing from various roles like HR, or from different departments, or even industries, which creates transparency, in that both you and the users will know what exactly to expect.
• Hybrid model – where you can combine both ways to further personalize your approach and make things more transparent.

Time for Conversion

Once you get everything in place, related to gaining more visitors, you can start acting on converting visitors into leads. You can teach your website to handle adaptive CTAs according to each visitor’s browsing or interaction history with your website. You might want to wait until your visitors return to your website, to provide direct CTAs, and not impose them with one, on their first visit, when they might be only looking for some information. Once your visitors get to know you better, things will get easier.
It is always best to have straightforward messages about your company on your site. You want your customers to feel that you are reliable and efficient, and that you are capable of delivering what they expect from you. Hence, all you need to do is talk honestly about your company. You can offer them free insights into your expertise (through blogs, case studies, e-guides, white papers and the like) before they ask, so that you don’t have to keep them guessing what the next step would be. Follow a logical sequence and give them all the information they need straight away.

This way, your website will become one of your primary drivers of sales. Without as much effort you put into other methods of direct marketing, you get to generate a lot of leads and convert them into sales, with just your website. That is how powerful your website can be.

Looking to develop such a website? Talk to our experts today to create powerful and effective websites for your business!

How did Nokia – a once leading mobile manufacturer, fall behind in its market and have to struggle from then on, to come up again?

How did the mighty British Petroleum company have to deal with a severe environmental crisis, which went on to become a major PR crisis as well?

The answer to both these questions is “poor communication” or a lack of effective communication. The first silent killer of your business!

According to a detailed analysis of what went wrong with Nokia, and why it is struggling now to convert its many good ideas into successful products, their major problem lies in their habits of communication. They sat through several, pointless strategy discussions over clearly cut out plans about introducing new phone models in the market.

As for British Petroleum, their 2010 Deepwater Horizon Offshore Oil rig disaster, was largely due to “poor communications” and a failure to “share important information”, as per a report on the White House Commission.

These examples show just how important having an effective communication system is in any organization, especially in the field service industry.

Lack of Proper Communication affects Employee Morale

Information has to be conveyed to the right people at the right time, whether it is an email to the manager, or a phone call to postpone the date of an order. Irrespective of the severity of the miscommunication, it will definitely drain the productivity and efficiency of an organization.

Besides that, lack of proper communication can affect employee morale. A collaborative and communicative work environment can boost employee productivity and promote creativity. On the contrary, poor communication can lead to lack of enthusiasm in doing assignments and hinder innovations.

“The effectiveness of communication depends on the relevance of the message, the time it is conveyed in, the person it is conveyed to and the means or method through which it is conveyed.”

Managers and leaders who can effectively manage the flow of communication in an organization, know, that they need to follow a certain set of practices and communication methods – ones that enable them to get closer to employees. They engage employees by encouraging them to take active part in the communication process. They also make sure that their communication efforts are in alignment with the organizational strategy.

The Second Silent Killer

The average American office worker is said to be using around 10,000 sheets of paper on an annual basis. That is to say, if your business has around 20 field representatives and 5 back office managers, that’s 250,000 per year. That’s a rough base for how much your business would be spending on paper every year, not to mention the printing costs as well. The average cost of printing a page comes to over three cents, so you can do the math right?
Apart from these, there are the storage costs. You need to store all of these documents, in an age where filing cabinets are expensive and take up valuable office space too.

Yes! Excessive paperwork could be the second silent killer of your business.
Several surveys have in fact revealed that switching from paper to electronic forms allows business owners to concentrate more on their revenues, as their entire organization spends much less time handling physical documents. On an average, making forms electronic apparently saves about 11 hours of work time per week for employees and about six hours for business owners.

Imagine the time that could be saved and used for doing more important work, that your field agents usually spend doing paperwork?

Apart from consuming time, manual paperwork can lead to errors, misplaced or missing sheets or forms and inaccurate reporting, all causing undue issues in your business. Unsatisfied customers and staff can in turn, affect your profitability and business position.

Go Digital!

If your business relies heavily on paperwork or has issues with poor communication, it’s time to change. Go digital. That said, spreadsheets or excel aren’t the proper automation tools, not even for small sized businesses most of the time. If your employees spend over 4 hours daily managing excels for multiple processes, it’s time for you to move into a software solution to automate those. The solution can either be an advanced free tool or custom software according to your preferences.

As a custom software development company, we specialize in creating software solutions that are tailored to the unique needs of our clients. Our team of experienced automation professionals can help you evaluate your current business processes and identify opportunities for improvement.

Field service businesses are trying to capitalize on the advantages offered by today’s technologies. Mobile technology, being the most significant among them, has taken the industry by storm, offering increased productivity gains, streamlines work processes, improved field agent communications, increased first-time fix rate, shortened billing cycles, reduced overhead of paper-based field service management and so on. The infographic puts together some recent trends, impacts and state of mobile technology in Field Service Businesses.

Interested in learning more on enabling your field team with mobile technologies? We’d love to know your business requirements and help accordingly, contact our specialist team now.

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</p><br /><br /> <p><strong>Please include attribution to www.fingent.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /> <p><a href=’https://www.fingent.com/blog/infograhic-mobile-technology-trends-field-service-2016-beyond’><img src=’https://www.fingent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/FIELD-SERVICE-MOBILITY-TRENDS-FOR-2016-BEYOND-aaa-01.png’ alt=’MOBILE TECHNOLOGY TRENDS IN FIELD SERVICE FOR 2016 & BEYOND’ width=’815′ height=’6567′ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /> <p>

After several years of living with the Internet of Things (IoT), ubiquity of software, and the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon, which has almost become mainstream now, we have a relatively new phenomenon coming up. The “Consumerization of IT”.

While BYOD, BYOPC and the like, are all elements of consumerization, it is actually much more than all that. It is a broader concept, that makes the end users do pretty much whatever they want, with the IT being powerless to a large extent in order of stopping or controlling them. In many cases, the IT doesn’t even know that they have people doing this.

So what exactly is consumerization of IT?

Consumerization refers to the proliferation of IT at the place of work, which originates in the consumer market, and is used for professional purposes. It basically involves the usage of consumer-oriented technologies at the workplace. It is a part of the cycle of IT, that emerges in the consumer market and then spreads to the business environment, primarily because consumers use popular technologies and devices like PCs, iPads and tablets in their homes and start introducing them at their work as well. Apart from devices, it also involves the use of online services like data storage, web based email systems and social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
It is completely driven by the employees themselves, as they buy their own devices, use their own online service accounts, download and install their own applications and often use their workplace network connection as well.

Why is it important for marketers?

“Over the next 30 minutes, over 700,00 apps are likely to be downloaded from the app store, up to 21,000 Twitter accounts are likely to be created and Facebook users will have spent around 146 man-days on it”

Consumer behaviour has undergone drastic changes over the past few years, ever since the advent of the mobile era. Their engagement through social media has increased more than ever. According to findings, over the next 30 minutes, over 700,00 apps are likely to be downloaded from the app store, up to 21,000 Twitter accounts are likely to be created and Facebook users will have spent around 146 man-days on it.
These figures only show how fast human interaction across networks is, and how consumers are almost always ahead in things, including technology, before businesses follow.

That way, consumer behaviour can be considered to be one of the major indicators of what might happen in the business world. Since they are always accustomed to new ways of thinking, they start expecting the same level of convenience from businesses as well.

For example, Amazon.com delivers, what can be called a superior shopping experience to its customers. They even have other third party affiliates paying them to make use of this experience. This makes it one of the best B2C companies. Even in the B2B segment, they have the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) Solution, which makes them one of the most preferred providers of cloud-based infrastructures in businesses as well.
With these two areas already mastered by Amazon, they could very well consider creating a rating system, just like the one in their consumer site, for B2B products and services as well. Put together with B2B related social media channels, it could become a powerful peer recommendation platform.

This kind of a spillover of consumer shopping, buying as well as using experiences, on business experiences is something that is going to affect product marketers and sales and marketing product management as a whole. In order to get ready for this “consumerization”, marketers might need to create specific and personal plans to analyze things and adapt, while at the same time implementing strategic plans for their entire company as well.

How can marketers adapt

Just like B2C marketers, who already know that they no longer have total control over their brand, B2B product marketers also need to understand that, with the explosive use of social networks and the media, they need to adapt and listen to conversations going on through the social channels. They need to meaningfully engage with their customers on a regular basis through social media.

Short, dynamic and engaging content is what businesses need to adapt to the consumerization effect basically. When such effective content gets delivered in different formats across various channels and to the right people, it reflects in the number and quality of your leads.

This way marketers and business officials can thus make use of the consumerization effect, and turn it to their advantage by taking the necessary steps.
As consumerization is something that is increasingly becoming popular, businesses do need to adapt to the phenomenon. Hence, the earlier the better. Analyze the significance of consumerization, its effect on your organization and start making the necessary changes right away.