Anytime, anywhere Enterprise 2.0
Guest post by Sameer Guglani, serial entrepreneur and mobile industry veteran. Sameer is an advisor to moblf
Sarah at Readwriteweb has a written a very good post titled “Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013”. I am a firm believer in this trend and have been watching it gather speed at my companies as well as at other companies I am familiar with. Enterprises are increasingly open to invest in tools of this nature.
In this context platforms like moblf will become a very important part of the Enterprise 2.0 solutions as they will allow enterprise solutions to be extended for anytime/anywhere availability, via SMS text messaging. And this connectivity will include all employees, even ones who don’t have regular internet or PC access as part of the job.
Employee facing use cases:
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A pizza hut delivery person can start collect payments from customer using his Mobile phone. The delivery person can also provide real time update - the status of success/failure of the delivery of the order. No need to invest in expensive custom devices with data connections and stuff.
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Popular agile project management tools like basecamp (from 37Signals) and Zoho can be made accessible on SMS. Allowing employees working on a project to create new milestones/tasks from their phone or to get list of pending tasks and milestones which are due this week.
Customer facing use cases:
- Mobile CRM extensions: Customer visiting Startbucks / Mcdonalds can send instant feedback via SMS, they don’t need to call toll free numbers or write an e-mail or go online to give feedback. A simple SMS text message will do the job, “I am the store on Battery Street in SF and service here sucks, my Chai was not hot and the staff was rude”. Customer will get an acknowledgement instantly and the required action can be taken by the company.
- Extend the product search: All online and offline retailers can enable catalogue search via SMS test messaging. The customer can initiate the search from the mobile using SMS text messages, he can choose to purchase via the mobile and get it shipped or go and pick it up from the nearest outlet. Amazon is already experimenting with it in an initiative called Amazon TextBuyIt
What do you guys think about this trens? What can be other use cases where Enterprises can benefit via integration with mobile, especially via SMS text messaging? Lets us know in comments…
