Extending communications to mobile workforce

NEW DELHI, INDIA:  Consider this:

•           Recent bad weather has prevented your employees from getting to the office, and now several major business deliverables are in jeopardy…

•           Several important clients have been complaining that key employees within your organization are inaccessible when they are out of the office, and several important requests made via email have gone unanswered…

•           One of your best salespeople quits to work for competition, and since she was using her personal mobile phone for business calls, two important clients are now calling the competition…

•           Your Human Resources department has reported that it is becoming increasingly hard to attract good employees in the local market, unless your company can offer a better balance between work and personal life...

•           Your at-home workers feel isolated from their peers, and need the same productivity tools as their colleagues back in the main office....

Chances are you’re seeing one or more business situations like the ones listed above. They’re symptomatic of an enterprise that lacks an enterprise-class approach to mobility.

The many mobile technologies available to enterprises today offer tremendous opportunities, but can fall short of expectations if they’re not implemented and managed in a strategic manner.

In fact, despite the ubiquity of cellular phones, research has found that only 45% of office workers are normally able to immediately reach key contacts, and 48%  pick up important messages late at least once a week, for the same reason.

This much is clear: Mobility goes far beyond the cellular phone, and simply issuing cellular phones to employees is not a mobility strategy.

Mobility vs. Enterprise-Class Mobility

Workers need enterprise communications in a large variety of work situations and locations, changing dramatically from day-to-day, and minute-to-minute. Expectations from customers and colleagues often extend beyond traditional business hours and locations.

In fact, a proper business continuity plan leverages the enterprise mobility solution in times of need. A robust approach is needed to meet all these needs, to ensure workers have consistent communication capabilities everywhere.

The ability to rapidly – and appropriately – communicate is an essential business asset that can help an extended enterprise navigate through these challenges and emerge with a competitive edge.

In particular, we see enterprise-class mobility as the right approach to help ensure that your employees – regardless of their physical location – remain an integral part of the enterprise and are highly effective, productive, and accessible to key stakeholders.

Simply put, enterprise-class mobility is an approach to give consistent, equivalent communications empowerment and control to all of your workers – whether they are at their desk or home-office, moving around the enterprise campus, or out on the road.

How Extended Is Your Enterprise?

As with any business plan, one of the best places to start is by understanding the requirements. To determine the specific needs that enterprise-class mobility can address, we recommend looking at your major business functions from a “who” perspective.

The following types of questions can help you identify the key individuals or groups of employees that are particularly well positioned to impact the performance of your business:

•           Which employees directly interact with your clients for sales and support?

•           Which staff members work with key partners and suppliers?

•           Who is involved with the development and delivery of your product or service?

In a normal workday, many employees will transition through different modes as they perform their jobs. Understanding the “mobility profile” of your key employees is an important step in ensuring that your enterprise has the right communications capabilities, devices and infrastructures to maximize individual productivity and effectiveness.

A complete enterprise mobility solution should address the needs of your employees across these different mobile work modes, and ensure that consistent capabilities and services can be provided regardless of access modes.

While many office workers rely on communications functions like voice mail, conferencing and call transferring, there are many other communication applications that are essential tools in performing their jobs and interacting with customers and colleagues. Extending your contact center, collaboration, your telephony and messaging applications to your mobile workforce is where the real value is generated for the organization.

Enterprise-class mobility gives you the ability to make those same tools equally available to all of your employees, regardless of their location or communications device. Equally important, your employees benefit from continuing to be part of the enterprise.

 The ability to extend these must-have communications tools across your enterprise depends on two main factors. First and foremost, the call processing software that powers your central voice server must be specifically designed and engineered to enable enterprise-class mobility. Second, your communications network needs to be converged and capable of handling IP telephony at appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) levels.

Network and Device Requirements for Enterprise-Class Mobility

While all employees benefit from having access to empowering communications capabilities, not all of your workers need the same devices or capabilities. Depending on an individual’s mobility profile, their needs can range from a standard desktop phone and PC to wireless-enabled laptops and PDAs.

Once you determine the devices you need to ensure a productive and effective workforce, you will also need to determine the specific network infrastructures and connectivity that will be required. This may sound intimidating and expensive, but many enterprises find just the opposite, particularly when compared to alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing while the competition advances.

What to look for in an enterprise-class mobility solution:

•    Simple to use, simple to administer

•    Consistent user capabilities and experience across all modes of work and devices

•    Mobile communications integrated with other modes

•    Mobile communications integrated into enterprise processes and business operations (e.g., mobile call detail records integrated with other call detail records)

•    Secure and reliable access and delivery of applications

•    Enterprise management and control of mobile devices and services

The many considerations of an enterprise-mobility strategy may seem daunting, but the potential payoff is too great for most enterprises to ignore.

The importance of providing your workforce with these competitive tools will only become more acute in the coming years. To help you get started, we offer the following list of 10 best practices for getting started on your quest for true enterprise-class mobility.

Determining the Business Fit for Strategic Enterprise Mobility:

Ten Things You Can Do To Help Ensure the Right Decision

Look across your customer-facing organizations to see whether communications provide, or prevent, a uniform, positive customer experience and corresponding brand image. Are you missing opportunities through missed calls?

Conduct an inventory of communications applications, devices and systems among the different groups. Identify inconsistencies that can hamper collaboration and uniform performance.

Deploy a pilot of controlled, consistent cross-location architecture, and measure improvements.

Ask your communications vendor to help assess your users’ needs and demonstrate solutions that can extend your communications, providing seamless communications to all workers including an assessment of wireless LAN performance, and ability to handle voice traffic.

Establish a one-number model for your users, especially customer-facing users. Transactions are accelerated, and the enterprise owns the number and the customer.

Ensure users are aware of the communications solutions that are available to them for their individual jobs, and train them to extract value from the solutions you provide. A PDA is unnecessary and overly expensive if it’s used only for keeping addresses.

To prevent your users from being overwhelmed by constant accessibility, create policies and guidelines for the enterprise and the workforce for when people must, and can’t, be reached.

Examine how and where your employees use their cellular phones. Cellular calls originating in your office buildings could be costing you much more than landline.

Select the right solution that meets the needs of your customers and the needs of your users, without over-engineering.

Work with a consultant that can analyze your network architecture and discover missed opportunities to reduce costs and/or improve the customer experience

Author is BU Head, Unified Communications, Avaya GlobalConnect.