6 Comments
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Anyone actually facing these VERY real issues should talk to me about the tools we are implementing.
There are good solutions available to solve most, if not all of the mobile management and control imparitives facing us today.
Great post Philippe!
Ric Reifel
RicR@BreakawayServices.com
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Thanks Ric – but what do you think. Is this a phenomenon you are seeing play out?
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Our company is in the managed mobility space and we have a suite of services that clients can choose from – the one getting the most traction for the last two quarters is the Help Desk support/MDM (such as BES, GOOD, etc.
So my response to your post is that it resonates very well with what our clients are facing today and will be facing in the near future.
I can give you specific example of clients who less than two years ago said to us that they only needed visibility (support was not an issue) now everyone of them has embraced outsourcing (I grant you that our sample is rather small but nevertheless true). 0 0 -
Now are you talking about outsourcing or a managed service? They are two very different things.
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Philippe,
You are right – our experience is that clients are paying to have us augment their resources (specifically in the help desk support, technical assistance and device administration) the point I am trying to make is that organizations large and small (a couple hundred wireless users) no longer view it as something they can handle internally. 0 0 -
Long time reader first time commenting.
I really appreciate your work Philippe. It’s great to hear people talking about these things.
Movero deals with the issues and scenarios you’re talking about on a daily basis. You’re spot on. I often imagine some mid-to-high level executive of a fortune 500 company screaming at a carrier customer care representative, after waiting on the phone for 30 minutes, because his “iPhonePadDroidBlackberry” enterprise CRM application, that’s connected through his corporate VPN or using some hosted cloud service, doesn’t quite work right.
How much time gets wasted on these and other situations? How well are the carrier reps even trained to deal with these scenarios from a simple communication standpoint? What happens when you have the same application on 4 platforms with 3 different carriers? Do people just get kicked up to Tier 3 only to be told to contact their IT department? If employees are directed to always call the IT help desk, how much time is wasted troubleshooting carrier issues that the IT department can’t readily fix and how much time do they spend waiting in line on the phone?
You’re other readers are right. There are lots of tools and services to help with managing mobility but there’s definitely no “silver bullet” and supporting end users to keep them productive while keeping IT help desk costs in check (not to mention preserving their sanity) is the ultimate goal.
Again, I appreciate your work and will be back for more. 0 0
Smartphone Customer Care: A Blessing For Operators Or A Curse For IT Departments?
It’s interesting to see this topic come up again, especially in the context of how T-Mobile has for so long heralded its customer care, while until recently Sprint has suffered much criticism for its “less than optimal” quality of care. The article did however make me think of one thing.
The end of the short article talks about how abdicating customer care to handset manufacturers or application service providers would be even more costly than having carriers invest in better customer service solutions. OK, perhaps, but what if I argued that the continued proliferation of smartphones was actually a blessing for carriers, all the while a greater and increasing curse for IT departments. Hear me out.
More and more people are buying smartphones (duh). More and more people are using their smartphones to connect to their corporate email (another duh). There’s a huge push for companies to leverage mobile applications such as CRM, SFA, ERP, etc (I don’t need to add commentary here, because you know what I’m going to say).
There’s already intense debate and concern in the enterprise mobility community regarding individually liable devices. Should companies allow them? Should everything be employee liable? Should everything be locked down? Doesn’t matter actually, because at this point the consumerization of enterprise mobility is an unstoppable force. That’s OK….as long as you manage the devices. Ensure policies, configurations, security settings, authentication protocols, etc. Piece of cake, right? Not so much.
Now here’s where it gets REALLY interesting. How on earth could a customer care representative at any carrier be able to troubleshoot these unique settings and configurations? At the most basic level, let’s talk about email, how would the carrier know if there’s anything wrong with your Exchange server? They *may* be able to read some things about how your BlackBerry is talking to your company’s BES, but beyond that, what are they *really* going to be able to do. They’ll send you to Tier 2, who will then send you to Tier 3, and you’ve now wasted your time, as well as theirs. Oh and by the way, then your IT guy will hear about this and probably blow a gasket.
S/He will then have to look at your device’s settings and make sure that the customer care people at the carrier didn’t mess any of the other corporate settings. You just made that person’s day.
OK, so instead you’re going to see a new policy coming from your company that says you must call IT first for any troubleshooting. See, your IT department IS kind and helpful. They just saved the carrier another customer care incident. Maybe the carriers should be giving money back to companies? No?
So support costs are going to go up – way up – but it’s going to be on companies….that is unless they deploy their own mobility management solutions, hire a company to provide managed mobility services (this could be a carrier by the way) or just punt the whole thing and outsource it all.
Thoughts?