Managing on mobile moments
The latest smartphone business apps and services are designed to operate businesses while on the run. Mobile apps are also powerful brand builders and sales generators. Bill Bennett reviews the mobile business app marketplace.
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You can run a sizeable organisation from a smartphone or a tablet. All you need is the right selection of mobile apps.
Two years ago anyone trying this would have struggled. Smartphones were barely up to the job. Newer devices with bigger, better screens and more powerful processors help.
While 2012’s 3G mobile phone networks were good enough to run a business on the run (they still are for people outside the main centres), 4G’s faster speeds today make mobile working much easier. There’s less waiting for things to happen, and wondering if something actually happened!
Most important of all, the latest generation of smartphone business apps and services have been tailored for operating a business while on the run.
Despite the early frustrations, trailblazers pushed mobile businesses into new areas. Those who got in early and found the right tools stole a competitive edge over their rivals.
Today, thanks to those pioneers ironing out all the wrinkles, managing a business while on the run is mainstream. This is especially true for those who mainly work away from base: tradespeople, engineers, building industry professionals and anyone else who spends most of their day on site.
Vodafone New Zealand head of small business, Lee Maddox, says he has noticed that fewer small businesses now have an office. Mobile devices can handle almost all paperwork — which, with luck, doesn’t actually involve paper. Documents that don’t come in electronic form can be photographed or scanned into a digital format.
For many, today’s office is a client’s site, the front seat of a car or in the back of a van. More intensive planning and organisation can take place on a kitchen table or even a comfy sofa.
What’s clear is that mobile apps now cover just about every business task; from managing bank accounts to sending invoices, and from point-of-sale to tracking complex inventories.
Technology building blocks
Maddox says for many industries mobile working is now mainstream. He has witnessed an explosion of smartphone use. “About 80 percent of our customers on our network now use smartphones,” he says. “We have more than 300,000 4G devices on our network, both smartphones and tablets.”
At the time of writing Vodafone has the most extensive 4G network in New Zealand; the network has been running for around 18 months and covers most cities and major towns. Telecom New Zealand is hotly contesting its rival. The company’s 4G network rollout is behind Vodafone’s but is already extensive in the main centres. 2degrees is set to launch its own 4G network in the second half of 2014.
While the earlier 3G network was designed for voice first and data second, today’s 4G networks have been built from the ground up with data in mind. 4G speeds are much faster; at times they can rival traditional landline broadband. Speed is important for using data-intensive smartphone apps, cloud computing or anything involving video. 4G makes a huge difference when it comes to working on the go.
And it doesn’t stop there. In May Telecom demonstrated carrier aggregation, a mobile data technology with a theoretical peak speed of 300Mbps – faster than UFB fibre.
Vodafone has similar technologies waiting in the wings. Devices making use of these speeds are expected to arrive in New Zealand towards the end of 2014.
Telecom New Zealand head of business in retail, James McLeod, says data is now a key consideration when people buy phones. They’re noticing customers asking for plans with larger data allowances — that’s because they are doing more work with their mobile devices.
Mobile the new normal
Almost anything that can be done using traditional computers can be accomplished with mobile devices.
“There’s a wide spectrum of usage,” Maddox says. “Email is ubiquitous, many customers use their devices to take notes or make recordings while working. Increasingly we are seeing apps like Office 365 being used from phones and tablets while on the move.”
Maddox says there are smartphone apps that give small companies the kind of tools that were once the preserve of larger corporations with deep pockets. He says he recently saw a smartphone app that allows business owners to monitor workplace health and safety. This kind of software costs hundreds of thousands to install in larger companies, but the smartphone app is within reach of every business.
He says one trend Vodafone noticed is an increase in the use of automated processes. Maddox says letting technology take the strain this way means people “don’t have to duplicate work they did on-site when they get home”.
This can be as simple as creating direct links between two different smartphone apps. Maddox says a ‘tradie’ using GeoOp, a job management application for trade and service companies, can enter data directly into the app while working at a customer site.
GeoOP integrates with Xero’s accounting software; so the job data can be fed automatically into the accounting system, which can in turn generate and automatically send an invoice. Maddox says the whole process can take place in the field more or less at the push of a button.
Reclaiming your weekends
Matt Mulligan, head of product development at MYOB, says his company has noticed similar trends.
“In the past business owners would talk about spending an hour or so at the end of the day to attend to administration. At least that’s the theory. The reality was they would let the work pile up, then work Saturday to catch up. People didn’t go into business to spend the weekend working as bean counters.”
Mulligan says by using smartphone apps, they get their weekends back. He says MYOB customer research shows its customers now get most of their administration done as they go. His company has developed tools to make that easier.
MYOB makes small business accounting software. Recently the company launched PayDirect, a free smartphone app for businesses in Australia — the software arrives in New Zealand in mid-2014.
The app allows users to take payments, send receipts, manage invoicing and keep contact information all from a smartphone. You don’t need to be an MYOB accounting customer to use PayDirect, but if you do then the data you collect while using the smartphone app goes directly into your accounting software.
Mulligan says a lot of business administration is complicated. “We asked our customers and they said they wanted help with collecting payments so we came up with PayDirect. They told us the software had to be simple. We did that. The front end is easy to use, but because we’re based in the cloud we can easily build attached services that operate behind the scenes.”
Living in a mobile moment
MYOB’s customer research found there’s a clear pattern in the way most tradespeople use smartphones. It’s something Mulligan calls a “mobile moment”. That’s when a tradesperson breaks off from the job in hand to spend a minute or two consulting their phone. Mulligan says you can see similar behaviour any day on any suburban street.
Mobile moments are short staccato bursts of smartphone activity. They usually involve a single task. It could be selecting purchased items from a pick list to build an invoice. It could be looking up the address of the next job, searching a parts catalogue or checking a customer’s payment record.
All of these can be done on the run with a few gestures on a phone screen, the less typing the better.
“This approach to handling administration tasks is much more small business friendly than catching up with paperwork at the end of the day.”
Vodafone’s Maddox says large companies already have access to sophisticated software, allowing them to plan resources and handle other administration. Although there are packages for smaller businesses, it wasn’t until the software moved onto phones and tablets that they could take full advantage.
Roll your own apps
It didn’t take business owners long to realise there’s more to apps than just consuming them. Increasingly companies develop their own apps for others to use. Telecom has research showing 80 percent of its business customers would like to offer their customers a smartphone app.
“Cost is a barrier, but apps work well for many industries,” McLeod says. “You only have to look at what taxi companies and event organisers are doing to realise the power of building apps. I saw a cosmetics industry report which said 45 percent of beauty products are now purchased through a mobile phone.”
He says customers want to buy online but aren’t always sitting in front of a computer when they remember they need something. This is especially true for business-to-business (B2B) transactions; an electrician may find they need something while on a job. In the past they’d need to get home before ordering; now they can buy the part online on their smartphone.
Mark Spurgeon, creative director for Studio Publica, a Christchurch branding, web and smartphone development specialist, says smartphone apps are an essential part of marketing if you want to reach certain demographics.
“They can become brand ambassadors. If one of your customers likes the app they’ll show it to all their friends, which is a powerful way of reaching people.”
He says for teenagers, games and apps with social media functions are likely to catch their attention. With older customers the current taste is for lifestyle and health-oriented apps.
Studio Publica develops apps to order for business customers. Spurgeon says his company’s projects are all handcrafted; some developers take short cuts pulling apps together from pre-built standard elements. This attention to detail works; at the time of writing there’s a Studio Publica-built app on the prestigious home page of Apple’s iTunes app store that’s seen 180,000 downloads.
One Studio Publica project in the works aims to speed consent processing and other official paperwork in the building industry. Professionals can use it to check documents and upload smartphone photos to check against plans. It also includes messaging to help people in different roles and different organisations, but working on the same job, to track each other’s progress.
Apps are a powerful way of building a brand; they can also do wonders for direct sales. McLeod quotes an Adobe Global App Survey that says the average user spends four times as long looking at an app as they do with a website. He says another survey puts that at three times as long. Both surveys report customers with an app are twice as likely to buy as those who visit websites.
McLeod also says work apps have to be more than just a small version of a website.
“In order for them to work, you have to know what customers might want from an app.”
›› Bill Bennett is an Auckland-based freelance business technology writer.
Email [email protected]