The mobile revolution has left businesses scrambling to come up with a strategy that combines both business and technical aspects of mobility in one strategic roadmap.
Let’s not beat around the bush anymore, mobile is here to stay.
Consider the following statistics:
In 2015, 70% of consumer engagement originated from a mobile device.
64% of decision-makers read e-mail on some kind of mobile device.
The enterprise mobility market will hit $140 billion globally by 2020.
It’s obvious that to remain competitive in today’s market, a mobile strategy created around your particular industry is imperative. While building your mobile strategy, you need to keep in mind all your stakeholders, customers, and the proper resources needed to accomplish your goals. Keeping track of employee mobile activities as well as aligning business owners to your overall company objectives are just some of the key things you need to recognize.
Mobility, thus, isn’t simply for interacting with your customers. It’s also for your employees, business partners, sales teams, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Essentially, you are creating a platform to address the needs of all of your constituents and aligning them with your business objectives in a cohesive, unified scheme.
Hence, you need to define business verticals and map them against factors you want to improve upon. Not every business is created equally – your business needs might be different than that of another sector or even your local competitor.
This post will help you build a plan of action by laying out which area of your business to prioritize first:
Productivity 
We all agree that business productivity is the product of a well-executed business strategy. Engaged, efficient and highly productive employees are those that accomplish tasks that are aligned with your organization’s strategic mission.
Using technology to optimize productivity is where businesses are headed today – specifically in the mobile domain. Mobile applications as well as other mobile software ensure that everyone from in the organization are simultaneously interconnected and have tools to overcome day-to-day business tasks in order to achieve overarching business goals.
Mobile tools allow for increased automation of tasks which in turn lead to higher efficiency and optimal rates of completing larger projects, giving your employees the time to work on larger strategic goals.
Take, for instance, BroadLand Housing Group (BHG). One of the largest housing associations in England, BHG provides over 4500 affordable homes across Norfolk and Suffolk. With over 50+ surveyors working on the ground performing numerous lengthy surveys and a 100 data entry technicians, manually adding data into the system became tedious and impeded the overall process.
With misreporting, delays in data collection and even data loss, BHG had to automate operations to replace the traditional pen and paper method that was costing them significant resources.
TkXel automated the field force operations; handling end-to-end design, configuration, deployment and integration of the field force property management and CRM platform. This allowed the surveyors to conduct quality surveys and reduce time spent on data gathering.
What used to be a manual process, now takes a few seconds on an iOS mobile device, saving hours of paper work and data entry every week. It has made the entire process more transparent, eliminating the chances of data loss and delays in gathering data. The direct impact of this tool has meant increased efficiency for 150+ employees – a clear and an immediate ROI.
In another instance, departments such as sales teams can utilize solutions that manage day-to-day activities such as meetings, opportunities and contacts. A calendar and motivation tool all in one, you can get your sales teams driven to create more business opportunities, work hard and achieve company goals.
Revenues
Take any industry, you’re not going to find less than twenty to forty key business processes, and hundreds or even thousands of sub-processes. Then, add an extensive layer of back office and front office technologies companies use on a daily basis (such as SAP for instance).
Adding mobility in this mix quickly becomes a risk that leaves enterprises with an uncertain future regarding the net impact on revenue.
However, studies have shown that enterprises that have a greater mobile maturity level share a few common features:
They take less time to develop and utilize new applications (typically within days)
They have a higher percentage of users with mobile access to cross functional applications
They have a higher percentage of users with mobile access to enterprise apps.
But there’s more.
The same study also established the effect of enterprise mobility adoption on business revenues, with the best companies validating:
20% increase in revenue on average
More than two times the revenue per employee as compared to low performing companies
Nearly four times higher profit margins
A decrease in customer churn of over 20%
It’s pretty clear that adopting mobility has a significantly positive and measurable influence on revenue. Without a doubt, only a few technologies in history can claim the title of bringing about such radical change that both businesses and customers have seen a complete transformation.
Take a sales team for instance. Salespeople are busy. They spend time on air and on the road and are actually the most mobile-inclined employees in a company.
With enabling mobility in sales, reports have shown that organizations exhibited a positive influence on top and bottom line business benefits. A direct impact was seen on revenue growth, sales effectiveness, and enhanced customer experience.
Hence, revenues are not only a top priority but of course, the reason why businesses exist.
Streamlining processes
Enterprise Mobility has been an excellent platform to streamlining organizational processes – a huge benefit to companies of all sizes, especially the smaller businesses that usually have a competitive handicap due to the lack of manpower and resources.
Take customer service, for example. Developing multiple mobile systems that work in synch is quite useful for customer service processes. For instance, enterprise mobility can develop a linkage between Point of Sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and social media platforms. There has been an increase in the creation of such services, so that businesses big and small reap benefits from the positive aspects of enabling mobility.
The Barclays office in London has enabled mobility and was able to streamline its front-end services. Installing a mobile intranet led to increased productivity through shared knowledge, continuous engagement between workers, and reduced expenses.
For its enterprise mobility enablement capabilities, Barclays won the Platinum Intranet Innovation Award in 2013.
Cost savings 
Of course, one of the biggest challenges for businesses implementing mobile in their day-to-day processes is the cost.
Hardware costs can be covered by using a BYOD policy, however, that simultaneously increases costs in the management department.
With over 67% of workers already using personal devices in their workplace settings, BYOD has seriously taken off. It has become increasingly important for employees to have continuous access to data on their smartphones. Company emails, files and calendar information are just some of the examples of the data that might be needed by an employee at any given moment. Of course, security becomes an issue when such vast data is being shared on devices in the workplace. IT departments need to ensure security of data while simultaneously increasing the levels of employee productivity which lead to massive cost savings in the long run.
File sharing, remote work teams, communication channels, and resource management are just some of the ways enterprise mobility enablement saves companies hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly.
From decreasing minor things such as printing costs to minimizing employee time on oversight, enabling mobility could be the best thing you have done for your business in a while.
Customer Value
Naturally, increased revenue is only supported with an improved customer service and support. The more value you provide to customers, the more loyal your customers will be and refer your brand happily.
With implementing mobility, organizations are better able to handle internal services, which allows them to focus on other things such as: inventory, sales, customer service etc.
In the retail sector, mobility allows retail workers to access product information in real time to help customers. In the manufacturing industry, enabling mobility means that a factory worker can immediately report faulty machinery the moment he/she discovers it. At the end of the day, customer value is added every step of the way.
Begin by implementing mobility at your front office operations – anywhere mobility can improve customer experience at any phase of a producer-customer relationship should be the top priority.
It’s obvious. Proactive and responsive companies will enable mobility in a way that serves customers first. Of course, the customer value is directly related to revenue – improve customer service by implementing mobility, watch your revenue skyrocket.
The benefits of a mobile solution are plenty and evident. Many firms, however, are discouraged from adding a mobile strategy either due to other priorities or by accepting a sloppy approach to mobility.
By developing a mobile roadmap, and defining your business goals – firms can come up with a strategic plan of action. The strategy will guarantee that the mobile initiatives are created with standards, consistency and connection to business goals in mind. Moreover, it will also give a general overview of how much time, money and other resources need to be invested for mobility to be deployed.