Wireless Sends a Message to Enterprise Customers: "We Care About Your Business"
Wireless messaging has exploded onto the communications landscape in the United States over the past few years. The nation's wireless users now send hundreds of millions of messages every month on devices ranging from mobile phones to data-only handhelds. Usage still isn't on a par with that found in Europe but there have been significant increases in the United States recently.
While wireless messaging is often associated with the consumer market, the business community actually was the early adopter in the United States, just as it was for the cell phone. In fact, trends in the wireless messaging marketplace are set by business applications. For example, business colleagues and customers conduct peer-to-peer communications (i.e. sending short, time-sensitive messages between their wireless devices) to "discuss" business issues and mobile employees manage their email wirelessly when away from the office.
Wireless Messaging: Part of Overall Business Strategy
The enterprise has realized an even greater strategic benefit to wireless messaging beyond communicating with colleagues and accessing important information while on the go — for many businesses, messaging is a critical tool that enhances customer service, strengthens client relationships, and retains the client. For businesses, "going wireless" has come to mean more than just choosing from an array of wireless handheld devices, pagers, or data-enabled phones to equip mobile workers. Rather, it is an essential part of an overall business strategy to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and more responsively meet customer requirements.
The logic is straightforward. Historically, corporate efficiencies have come about through the quicker routing of material and information through a company's business infrastructure. Things that improve workplace productivity — such as wireless email and messaging — allow people to do more of what they are charged with doing in any given day. And as a by-product of being more efficient, customers are better served.
Though customer satisfaction drivers vary by industry and category of customer, conventional wisdom tells us that personal, responsive service is one metric that crosses all boundaries. Mobile workers (such as field service, sales, and management staffs) whose functions rely heavily on timely information sharing can better respond to customer needs, more quickly resolve problems, and provide requested information such as delivery schedules or pricing information. With more timely access to information, customers and clients alike can make more informed decisions, thereby yielding greater results.
Many field organizations implementing wireless data strategies are building guaranteed response times into their service contracts. Thus, they are gaining competitive advantages — such as improved customer recruitment, retention, and loyalty — over rivals who can't make similar service-level guarantees because they lack strategic wireless capabilities. Over the next few years, however, wireless data capabilities for enterprises will evolve from offering competitive advantages to becoming a competitive requirement. Today's differentiators will become tomorrow's table stakes.
Though a number of different wireless data services exist on a variety of handheld platforms, the general characteristics of a wireless data solution include:
- Packages that includes airtime, software, and mobile handheld devices
- Devices featuring an easy-to-use interface, such as a "thumb typing" keyboard and navigation track wheel
- The ability for users to send and receive text messages up to 16,000 characters depending on device to one person or many people at once
- On-screen indicator to show that messages are delivered and read
- The ability for users to send and receive Internet email
- The ability for users to organize contact address book, calendar, task lists, and notes
Blackberry Study Finds Users Enhance Responsiveness
An extensive recent study conducted by Ipsos-Reid with BlackBerry wireless email users has found that almost all users (93 percent) agree that BlackBerry has allowed them to convert downtime into productive time by letting them access to their email at times when they previously could not. In fact, the typical user recovers an average of 53 work minutes a day because BlackBerry enables them to convert what traditionally was downtime (traveling, waiting for meetings, waiting at the airport) into productive time. Due to its ability to enhance a user's responsiveness and awareness, BlackBerry also returns value in the form of immediacy.
The report says that immediacy is a second but distinct form of productivity because individuals contribute value to their firm not only in direct relation to their salary but also in relation to their personal responsiveness, timeliness, and effectiveness. Types of distinct immediacy gains enhanced by BlackBerry include client retention and acquisition through improved responsiveness, transaction gains, and workforce productivity gains. Quantifying the immediacy benefits provided by BlackBerry requires placing a value on each time-sensitive communication that is facilitated using BlackBerry while the user is mobile. Typical BlackBerry users report that they receive an average of 59 business emails per day, of which an average of 35 percent (or 21 emails per day) are time sensitive. In fact, 26 percent of BlackBerry users state that at a minimum, half of the emails they receive are time sensitive.
While this study was specific to one wireless data solution, similar results have been observed with other devices and services.
Kelley-Drye: Law Firm
One firm demonstrating these efficiencies is Kelley-Drye, a New York-based law firm. Kelley-Drye has 850 employees focusing on corporate litigation, labor, environmental, telecommunications, and real estate issues. As more and more clients began to expect near-immediate response from the firm, its attorneys needed to be increasingly attentive, no matter where they were working. Compounding this situation was work-related travel — away from the office, the phone and computer, which have traditionally been their lifelines to clients. To improve communications responsiveness, the firm has deployed 300 wireless data devices for administrative staff, managers, directors, the executive director, and even some of the paralegal staff.
With the wireless data solution, Kelley-Drye attorneys are better able to serve their clients immediate needs, whether they are commuting into work on a train, working at their child's soccer game, or in court. In one instance, a Kelley-Drye associate was in court, and had an important client issue come up. He was able to email a colleague back at the firm, and get information without disrupting the proceedings that helped him with his case — right then, in the courtroom. Attorneys also find the service useful for communicating with each other — if they are trying to find an expert, or research a point of law, they can query their peers on the spot.
Boston Coach: Ground Transportation
For Boston Coach, improved logistics information was the key to improved customer satisfaction. The wireless data solution it deployed included a customized, integrated software application to directly tie into Boston Coach's existing dispatch and reservation systems. Wireless allows Boston Coach drivers to receive and send information inside or outside of the vehicle. With handheld devices, drivers are able to access critical information whether they are waiting to greet travelers in airport terminals or in the vehicle. The information being exchanged is always current, reflecting last minute changes. In total, the company expects to deploy the solution in more than 700 Boston Coach-owned vehicles in major northeastern cities.
FedEx: Package Delivery
FedEx Ground is an operating company under the Federal Express corporate umbrella specializing in ground transportation of small packages. FedEx Ground has equipped more than 9,000 pickup-and-delivery vans with an onboard computing solution, which allows for communication with a mobile data terminal carried by delivery drivers as they go from stop to stop. It is used for collecting data and information about the pick-ups and deliveries made on a daily basis — such as time of delivery, date of delivery, specific tracking identification numbers on each package, and an electronic signature of the person that signs for those packages. Once that information is collected, each delivery contractor returns to his or her vehicle and puts the data terminal in a mobile computer device that transmits that information over the network back to a data center. The immediacy of the data transfer allows delivery confirmations to be achieved faster and more efficiently.
Honeywell: Professional Services
Honeywell Automation & Control Solutions (ACS) Service has implemented a wireless data solution designed to reduce administrative steps, supply quicker access to vital customer information, enhance field service communications, hasten customer response time, and reduce paperwork. The program is designed to significantly reduce the 18,000 to 20,000 pieces of paper generated each week by Honeywell's ACS Service's building systems service business. In addition, going wireless means fewer administrative backlogs, easier access to vital information, better communications with field service technicians — and faster customer response time overall.
Under its Field Automation Service Technology (FAST) initiative, Honeywell ACS Service is arming 1,400 building services technicians with handheld wireless communications units. When a customer service call comes into Honeywell's centralized dispatch center in Atlanta, the information is dispatched directly to the technician's handheld computer. The technician receives relevant customer equipment information and service contract data. Once the work is completed at the customer site, the technician wirelessly sends the completed work order to Honeywell databases for invoicing, data mining, and history availability. This eliminates the need for time-consuming phone calls and slashes the paperwork involved. The back-end integration also allows Honeywell ACS to distribute invoices more quickly.
Honeywell is able to provide a more responsive service to its customers by improving productivity and removing non-value-added tasks. This gives the company an opportunity to respond sooner to customer calls. But more importantly, once technicians get to a customer site, they are armed with more information about the customer and about the customer's equipment. It takes less time to make repairs or troubleshoot problems because more information and history about the equipment is available onsite.
Conclusion
At a time when customer loyalty is essential to profit and company longevity, these companies are also increasing the essential ingredient of business success — customer satisfaction. As these anecdotal examples illustrate, a vital by-product of efficiency-driven wireless data services is vastly improved customer responsiveness that is synonymous with customer satisfaction. As a result, wireless data implementation plans are making their way into strategic business plans across corporate America.
