Mobile is the new…Everything
Mobile adoption is growing rapidly and showing no signs of slowing. Recent data by the International Telecommunication Union (ICT) estimate that 77% of the of the world’s population, 5.3 billion people, have mobile subscriptions.
Morgan Stanley’s research shows that smart phone shipments will exceed PC shipments this year. Research by global consulting organization Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu further confirms the other analysts’ sentiments – mobile is big and continuing to grow.
Why the astounding growth in mobile? It’s convenient. It’s sexy. People just love it. According to Dr. Raj Nathan, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Sybase,
“With their big, bright displays, intuitive interfaces and high-speed Internet connections, smartphones, tablets and other portable devices put a wealth of services and information at users’ fingertips. Not surprisingly, these users want the same convenience and data accessibility they enjoy at home and everywhere else to work for them in the office as well.”
As mobile adoption continues to expand and increasingly agile organizations allow more flexible work arrangements for employees , traditional desktop enterprise applications, like CRM are migrating into users’ hands.
Are You Ready for Mobile CRM
Is your organization ready to take customer relationship management system (CRM) mobile? Having a mobility strategy is quickly becoming necessity, not a choice. Luckily, however, mobile adoption can be beneficial for you organization, especially for CRM use. Other some considerations:
- Mobile allows CRM to go with your staff and increase productivity. Once CRM goes mobile, it can be accessed right before or after walking tonto an account – improving the accuracy of information captured.
- Improved accessibility sales, marketing and service roles may not be able to get to their desk, that doesn’t mean they don’t need data about clients or prospects. Moving CRM to mobile makes the data constantly available when they need it. Customer responsiveness is always good for the revenue stream.
Mobile CRM is attractive, but it’s not magical. You must understand your requirements and the benefits you expect to achieve prior to getting wrapped up in the tool selection.
From a marketing perspective, it’s clear that the amount information consumed via mobile devices has exceeded the tipping point. Are you optimizing your content to appeal to mobile users?
CRM Vendors Embrace Mobility
Even if you aren’t quite ready, CRM are. Many popular vendors have wholly embraced mobility and offer mobile versions of their applications. Many are even going further and not just creating a mobile replica of the desktop application.
Popular open source CRM vendor, SugarCRM, focused deeply on social, mobile and internationalization in version 6 of its platform. The vendor offers an iPhone version and announced support for Android and Blackberry and iPad during SugarCon earlier this month.
Sage, which provides Sage ACT! SalesLogix and SageCRM software, has introduced mobile support to its entire platform. Last month, the company released a mobile version of SalesLogix. The software supports multiple devices, doesn’t require additional components and is free. iPhone support has been added as core feature to latest release, version 7.1, of Sage CRM.
Sage ACT! supports a cloud-based mobile service that delivers Sage ACT! contacts and calendars to multiple mobile devices including BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile®, and Android™.
Other major vendors from Oracle to Salesforce.com have also adopted the mobile platform. Is mobile part of your CRM implementation strategy? How has it changed how your work? We would love to know.