If you have not yet embraced “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD), you don’t have to feel left out … your employees are probably doing it for you.
At least that’s the rising sentiment among IT industry observers who track the “consumerization” of IT.
But there are key ways to get out ahead of BYOD and even turn it into a major productivity advantage, especially if you have a mobile salesforce that does a lot of its work on the phone.
BYOD Everywhere
BYOD has taken hold in virtually every sector. Instead of buying and supplying IT devices to their employees, companies using BYOD will permit employees to use their own laptops and smartphones to get work done.
Similarly, an article in Manufacturing Business Technology magazine reports that 63% of manufacturing companies now permit BYOD, largely because Millennial workers expect it.
Naturally, chief inhibitors of BYOD are concerns over security and compliance with corporate policies.
But this still means less than half of companies have such policies. Security experts warn that companies that do not address BYOD are very likely permitting it anyway by default. Employees are using their own devices to get work done even if you do not officially permit it.
This has been dubbed “Shadow IT,” which is the unauthorized use of devices, software and cloud services by employees.
Productivity Boosts from BYOD
Advocates of BYOD policies often cite cost reductions and enhanced productivity as reasons to adopt the practice. You can reduce the capital budget for buying IT devices. Your employees can use the devices with which they are most comfortable, cutting support tasks for your IT team and cutting employee downtime.
But you can win even more compelling productivity benefits if you consider how BYOD can be integrated into your broader corporate processes.
One of the best examples is how companies can integrate mobile devices including BYOD into the sales workflows. This is the focus of our Salesforce.com CRM mobility solution.
Imagine this scenario:
Your salesperson in the field needs to place a call to an important customer purchasing manager about a pending order. But the salesperson is traveling between cities. If he waits until he is back in the office to return the customer’s call, then the interaction will be delayed. If the interaction is delayed, the deal may not go through in time to make the numbers.
Of course, no good salesperson is going to risk that delay. So your salesperson uses his personal cell phone to contact the customer ASAP.
In traditional mobile communications, this call would go completely undocumented and essentially unknown to the CRM system. Your salesperson would be required later to log the call and close out the task in Salesforce along with whatever other administrative steps are needed for your sales workflow. A sales manager back at the office may be worried that the call was never placed and the deal is at risk.
The Automatic Way
But let's say instead that you have deployed the Kinetic Communications Platform from Tango Networks.
The salesperson’s BYOD smartphone is directly integrated into the corporate communications systems. Our Kinetic platform makes the device look and act like a traditional corporate landline desk phone.
Better yet, the call the salesperson makes to the customer is automatically captured and logged in your company’s implementation of Salesforce.com. Our Kinetic platform features direct integration with your Salesforce.com CRM so that all communications tasks on these mobile devices will be attached to the right customer records.
On top of that, the communications from a salesperson’s personal device can be monitored and archived by the same quality assurance systems and compliance systems you use with your landline systems, if that is a policy requirement.
With the Kinetic platform, it doesn't matter if the employee makes the call on his personal phone or where and when he does it. The call is automatically tied to your corporate workflow and is compliant with your corporate policies.
Now your salesperson can get on with selling instead of logging every call task. And your IT department can more easily embrace BYOD and realize even more benefits and productivity gains.
Check out the demo video of our Salesforce integration solution. And contact us today for a personalized demonstration of how our Kinetic platform will boost your sales team’s productivity while enabling flexible BYOD at the same time.