Here are 3 different ways your company can leverage remote workers.
Dealing with a mobile workforce (remote workers) is becoming a necessity for today’s enterprise.
Three in four U.S. workers will be mobile by 2020, International Data Corporation estimates. This shift to a mobile workforce reflects a more seismic shift in enterprise mobility spending, which will help propel the global mobility solutions market to $1.6 trillion this year and $1.7 trillion by 2021, IDC projects.
Markets seeing the demand:
- Professional services
- Banking
- Discrete manufacturing and
- Retail
The above are seeing some of the biggest requests for mobility solutions, as technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and 5G are making mobile technology increasingly critical to business success.
Enterprises that have a mobile infrastructure capable of leveraging these vital technology trends have a distinct advantage over competitors who don’t. If you’re looking to increase your company’s mobile capability, here are three strategies you can pursue.
1. Use a Unified Communications Platform
Shifting to a mobile corporate communications paradigm means moving away from seeing mobile as one more communications tool and embracing mobile as part of an integrated approach.
A typical problem plaguing most companies’ communications is a vast plurality of tools and providers.
For instance, today’s average contact center manages no less than 18 different communications vendors due to the wide range of tools employed.
To name a few:
- smartphones
- tablets
- PCs
- texting
- live chat
- video chat
- social media and
When your workers are not only using multiple tools, but are managing them from multiple remote locations, this can compound the complexity. Workers can get overwhelmed, and information can get isolated and lost, leading to inefficient communication.
For instance, customers who are already irritated about an issue they just got done talking about for an hour over live text may face mounting frustration when they have to repeat the same information over the phone.
A unified communications platform solves this problem by replacing your physical communications center with a digital cloud contact center that integrates all your communications channels.
Regardless of where your team members are located or what devices and channels they are using, they can all access the same data.
This makes it easy to manage conversations even if they move from one communications channel to another, and even if the conversation partners are located in widely distributed locations.
2. Employ Cloud-Based Collaboration Tools
A unified communications platform lays a foundation for cloud-based collaboration, another vital component of a mobile work strategy. Traditional collaboration uses email for functions such as task scheduling, file sharing and project tracking.
But email wasn’t designed to be a collaboration tool, and it suffers major limitations when used as one. For instance, tracking long conversations may require scrolling through archived threads.
This problem becomes compounded if someone joins a multi-party conversation late.
File versions can also get out of sync when files are being shared between multiple partners.
Cloud-based collaboration tools are designed to overcome these limitations by replacing the email paradigm with an interface similar to social media.
Social media is designed to allow multiple partners to see entire conversations at a glance, while keeping files in sync for all conversation participants.
This allows for real-time collaboration between workers even when they’re in widely separated locations and time zones.
3. Make Mobile Security a Priority
A mobile workforce opens your enterprise up to new security challenges.
Having worker mobile devices connected to your network, each potentially with its own operating systems and apps, creates more potential vulnerabilities and vectors of attack. Additionally, there is the challenge of ensuring that remotely-dispersed workers comply with your corporate security policy.
These considerations mandate making mobile security a priority.
Today’s cybersecurity best practices focus on prevention through strategies such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, endpoint protection suites and content filters.
Prevention can be supplemented by detection strategies, such as use of security information event and management solutions that use artificial intelligence (AI) to pinpoint suspicious activity. Some of today’s latest mobile devices have on-device AI security tools built in to their hardware.
These strategies must be supported by strong bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, such as protecting devices with passcodes and biometric authentication, encrypting data, keeping operating systems and apps updated, and maintaining remote wipe capability.
Adopting a unified communications platform provides a basis for an effective company mobility policy. Using cloud-based collaboration tools leverages your mobile communications network for efficiency.
Mobile security ensures that data shared over your company’s mobile network stays secure. Pursuing these mobility strategies can make your company more agile, more productive, and ultimately more profitable.