Are your executives happy with the progress of your organization’s mobility efforts? Probably not. Join the club a very big club with a lot of members.
Despite the large number of mobile apps being released by enterprises, a recent survey of 1,425 IT and business executives finds only one in four are completely satisfied their mobility projects. The survey, published by CA Technologies, finds this dissatisfaction is closely connected with low customer satisfaction with mobile approaches.
Surveys such as this help open the eyes of insurance executives seeking to capitalize on the mobile revolution. Insurers have been leading the pack for some time with apps enabling accident reporting, rates, and advice. Now it’s time to move things to the next level baking mobility into all levels and divisions of the enterprise. There is an urgency to adopting a mobile strategy, the CA report states: “Your customers are more likely to interact with your brand through an app than through interactions with your employees,” the CA report states. “But simply providing the next killer app is no longer enough. Consumers’ expectations around application usability, performance and security have never been higher, and you can lose a customer in a split second if you have not focused on optimizing their experience.”
The problem is that mobile-enabled environments and apps have been designed in haste a casualty of today’s hurry-up-and-push-it-out-the-door mentality. So there have been apps rustled up by the IT department, or by marketing without IT’s awareness, and thrown out into the market. These disjointed efforts are the main reason for executive and customer frustration is the haphazard approach to mobile computing initiatives, observed CA’s Arun Bhattacharya. “Mobility is not new to enterprises, but IT organizations have often been on the defensive and put in a position of needing to play catch-up. First came the BYOD onslaught from employees insisting on using their own devices and personal mobile apps; next it was the customers who wanted to access corporate information securely, from any device,” he said. “IT had no choice but to respond, and respond quickly.
The good news is that most enterprises recognize this as a key challenge their number-one priority for mobility projects today is improving the overall end-user experience, the survey finds. Improving the end-user experience has risen up the scale from the fourth priority in CA’s 2013 survey -- indicating “that organizations are taking this issue seriously.”
The survey looked at the practices of leading organizations in mobile. They “drive a better customer experience is to adopt an enterprise-wide approach to mobility. In fact, 40 percent of respondents have already adopted enterprise mobility and another 47 percent plan to in the next two years. By taking a holistic approach to improving and securing the overall end-to-end mobile experience, organizations are reaping huge rewards.”
For example, companies taking holistic enterprise approaches to mobility report six times more end users who are completely satisfied with their mobility products or services, the survey report finds. In addition, twice as many enterprise mobility adopters have already seen an improvement in overall user experience; and enterprise mobility adopters have seen a 24 percent revenue increase
From customer-facing mobility apps and a 25 percent improvement in the overall customer experience.
“A couple of years ago, all you had to do was have a MDM solution,” said Bhattacharya. “Now people need to have enough runway to put these solutions into a test production environment to be able to see the benefits and whether they’re getting ROI. Life in the mobility world is moving very fast and we’re now looking at the benefits of solving parts of the problem but had underestimated the total mobility challenge.”
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant, blogger and frequent INN contributor specializing in information technology.
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