Companies have a perceived problem: should they give employees a mobile phone and risk that private calls are made at the company’s expense? A report from Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab indicates that greater access might actually increase productivity.
To increase revenues from the enterprise market, a company’s employees need to be more efficient. More-efficient employees equal greater productivity – something enterprises are willing to pay for.
Rushing into mobile data, however, is not necessarily the right strategy. A step-by-step approach is better, expanding mobile and converged voice first, then adding advanced services.
The first step is to reach for the “low-hanging fruit” by expanding mobile voice connectivity to a greater proportion of the workforce. Today, almost half of all employees use a mobile phone for work, but most of them pay for work calls themselves. Imagine how many more employees would use mobile voice services if their employers paid.
Studies from Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab have proven that when the employer pays, the number of minutes spent on work calls increases significantly, resulting in an immediate increase in productivity. Yet personal calls do not rise significantly, so enterprises need not be overly worried about abuse and the subsequent cost implications.
What enterprises need to realize is that targeted voice solutions result in productivity gains that significantly outweigh the incremental cost of the solutions. Mobile or converged fixed-mobile voice to more employees means that a culture of mobile availability will grow, increasing overall company productivity.
As a second step, once employees are accustomed to mobile and converged voice, enterprises can improve their competitive edge by adding more-advanced communication services.
The enterprise market contains numerous lucrative opportunities. The key is to understand employee needs, develop services that make them more productive, and prove the benefits to enterprise decision makers.
The best way to approach this task is to form true partnerships with enterprise customers, and work jointly to define mutually beneficial service packages based on real employee behaviors and that address unmet needs.
The solutions they develop together should recognize that end user requirements can vary. Solutions must consider employees’ varying levels of technology readiness, as well as the diverse requirements generated by each employee, given their gender, age, and job characteristics.
Ericsson Consumer and Enterprise Lab has collected a wealth of research from many sources, looking all the factors company decision-makers take into account when selecting new communication solutions. All these highlight the complexity of the decision-making process for communication solutions, but generally show that a group, rather than an individual, is responsible for deciding on new communications solutions.
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