Hosted Users Can Improve Business Performance with Mobile UC
Mobile communications is a pervasive component of modern business. Half of the Mobile panel have at least 85% of their employees using mobile phones and mobile communications is very important to the success of 66% of the Mobile panel, representing some 349 organizations from around the world. Despite it’s importance, few actually rated their satisfaction with the mobile communications experience highly. There is plenty of room for improvement in policies, processes and support for mobile applications.
This report is the eighth in a series about mobile UC in business. The experience of users of Hosted IP telephony services are compared with the Mobile Panel. Recommendations are developed from the comparison of Top Performers.
Among Hosted users, accounting for 9% of the Mobile panel which is roughly the share of enterprise telephony market for hosted services, mobile communications is roughly equally important as for most panel members (68% for Mobile panel versus 59% for Hosted users). Satisfaction with the mobile phone and corporate priorities and policies remains consistent with the bulk of the Mobile panel, yet Hosted users are the least satisfied with their mobile operators. This shows the pathway to improving business performance, which is well-below the standard measured among Top Performers.
Over the past decades, mobile communications improved a users’ reachability, but reduced accountability and convenience to mobile users and their coworkers back in the office. Mobile UC is the next major improvement for unified communications. Mobile UC solutions available today can overcome these weaknesses by delivering accountability, which allows the enterprise IT department to analyze statistics on usage, apply policies for lowest cost, storage and security and by delivering convenient communications between coworkers, regardless of whether they are mobile or at their desk.
The Mobility Index provides a refined view of the scope of technological deployments which reveals how Top Performers have significantly better operating results than Poor Performers. Top Performers had higher business performance:
- 41% more customer satisfaction
- 114% more employee satisfaction
- 87% more green-ness
- 43% more financial strength
- 21% greater customer responsiveness, and
- 14% more revenue per employee
than Poor Performers.
Although it may have been true at one time, mobile communications technology alone does not lead to higher business performance. Only the integration of mobility services into the mobile employees value-creating processes is the key to unlocking the higher productivity attributable to mobile UC, and the key element of that integration is the extension of classically-defined enterprise communications into the mobile service domain.
The gap between Top Performers and Hosted users is broader than between Top Performers and Poor Performers, indicating that the particularly solid opportunity to use mobile UC to improve business performance is great among Hosted users.
Recommendations reflect the technology, organizational and processes deployed and consistently used by the Top Performers and not used by Hosted users. These include investing in mobilizing critical enterprise applications, deploying mobile-savvy support staff and resources and adopting qualification procedures for new devices and new classes of devices. Taking steps to mobilize more of the employee-base and enabling more services such as mobile email and SMS are excellent first steps but should also include adoption of mobile UC-specific solutions for extending enterprise telephony features into the mobile service domain.
