Mobile Personalization

In a world where mobile workforce communications have become a cornerstone of business, there are still only a few corporations that look beyond e-mail, voice and SMS. 

 

They somehow fail to utilize enterprise IM communications and leave it for ad-hoc user adoption. 

 

When organizations add IM and location-based communications to the mix they are able to achieve the ultimate mobile collaborative platform, SMS chat, location-based services, messaging, sharing pictures or push-to-talk services.

 

This fourth mobile service, despite being loaded with various benefits, is still not embraced by many organizations. Tim Rea, CEO of Palringo, explains the value of a platform-independent workforce communications IM solution, integrated with location-based communications.

 

In the past two decades, the ubiquity of mobile workforce communications has transformed the global economy.  To transform logistics, improve the quality of engineering field forces and enable effective remote working from sales to senior management, organizations have looked to leverage increasingly robust and stable mobile technologies, such as location-based communications.

 

Various mobile tools have certain limitations. SMS is no good for any interactive communication and messages are not always reliably delivered, especially at peak time; e-mails may provide rapid one-to-many communication.

However, there is many field staff that is uncomfortable picking out e-mails slowly on small keyboards. Voice calls are sometime too expensive and are either very intrusive or result in inefficient telephone tag (News - Alert), with users all too often forced to leave multiple voice mail messages.

 

On the other hand, instant Messaging is immediate and interactive, yet not intrusive; and delivery is typically instantaneous. Owing to this it has gained immense popularity amongst consumers. IM however remains primarily an internal PC-to-PC tool in the business world.

 

Only a few organizations today have been able to create any robust enterprise IM communications strategy.

 

Organizations, with this additional IM-based functionality, will be able to transform workforce communications and the way teams interact and collaborate. With instant picture sharing, Enterprise IM communications can enable field workers to gain immediate feedback from colleagues on the best way to address a specific engineering problem.

 

The customer service staff, rather than telephone or text each member of a team in turn, which is both time-consuming and expensive, can use Vocal IM to an entire team or group to simultaneously ask questions regarding a specific customer.

 

Location-based communications services can also be used by them to attain an immediate view of every group member's location at any time, typically combined with their presence, degree of proximity and location-based information, enabling far more effective resource management.

 

The cost associated with deploying mobile IM workforce communications and location-based communications at an enterprise level has, to date, been significant. The only problem is market fragmentation.

 

Two choices are offered to the organizations: either opt for a specific platform, requiring dedicated and expensive devices and significant contract costs; or allow staff to take responsibility for their own phone acquisition and contract but rely on publicly-used IM platforms.

 

This tends to risk personal IM overlapping with corporate communications and therefore results in relatively poor support for mobile IM.

 

In such a situation an organization finds it difficult to exploit the value of enterprise IM communications and location-based communications. However, with the help of a flexible, extensible workforce communications solution that can be implemented as a device-independent, operator-independent, hosted service, the organizations can solve their problems. Secure internal communications with optional connections to popular public IM systems, if required, or restrict communications to a specific peer group are also supported by such workforce communications solutions.

 

The enterprises by adding the fourth mobile service with location-based communications to the existing workforce communications platform can finally achieve true mobile collaboration and deliver real productivity benefits through enterprise IM communications.