Redwood Telecommunications, the Unified Communication specialist, is encouraging organisations to embrace the benefits smartphones can bring the enterprise. Flexible working, information sharing or opening a new route to market are just some of the ways smartphones are delivering significant benefits.
Managing Director, Charlie Whelpton, explains: “For many, a smartphone, like an iPhone, is highly desirable, whether for personal or business use. Businesses need to enable their applications to work with their users’ device of choice’. In January, Forrester predicted smartphones would explode into the enterprise in 2010 because of the increased functionality that they offer. Organisations need to be ready for the impact that these devices have on their communications platforms.
According to Gartner recently, smartphone sales doubled in a year and 19% of global mobile device sales are smartphones. In the enterprise market, BlackBerry is by far the enterprise smartphone platform of choice. It claims to have the most robust security and the most comprehensive management features. It has also gained an excellent reputation in the business community. However, the iPhone is more desired by business users but it hasn’t yet won the hearts and minds of the IT department for enterprise rollout.
“You can’t get away from the fact that smartphones are a very powerful business device that can help take your organisation to another level,” continues Charlie. These are just some of the ways that smartphones are revolutionising the way organisations can do business:
1. Flexible, organised working
With a smartphone, it doesn’t matter where you are you still have access to your email, calendar, contacts, tasks lists and a multitude of other apps. The ability to communicate through any channel, and review and edit documents, means you can work on the train, whilst waiting for a colleague or in your own time when needing to respond to a client or your boss.
For organisations, this means that employees can be always available.
For individuals, they can still be in touch with the office even when they are on a beach with their family. The smartphone is helping those that need to stay in touch, to be in touch more effectively.
2. Access to information and information sharing
With immediate, fast access to the internet through your smartphone, you are able to find information quickly when you’re on the move.
Taking the internet to the mobile device gives employees the ability to respond to client needs much faster as well as help themselves to information such as train timetables and local Wi-Fi hotspots.
Being able to send and receive considerably more data on a smartphone, collaborative working is possible. Smartphones allow the sharing of large files such as tender responses, design files and contracts, and the functionality to take photographs or video while onsite and send them to colleagues back at the office. Sharing these files and enabling them to be viewed and edited on a smartphone means response times to a client can be much faster and remote workers can communicate with office-based staff instantaneously, dramatically reducing time to complete a task.
3. New route to market
With the smartphone being so desirable at a personal level, the smartphone can provide a new route to market. Whether that is in the creation of a relevant app for customers or promoting a product or service through MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services), for example, the smartphone makes engaging with customers wherever they are more possible.
4. Multi-channel communications
Fundamentally, a smartphone can enable an employee to communicate anywhere, anytime and on any channel. From a voice or video call, to email and SMS, through to communicating using instant messaging and social networks, such as Facebook and twitter. Different people, whether clients, suppliers or colleagues, want to communicate in different ways. The smartphone allows this to happen using just one device.
There is no question that organisations have got to make the move to be able to deal with the impact that smartphones will have on their organisation; both internally and from customers interacting with them.
