The Hidden Perks of a Mobile Workforce

With over a billion workers worldwide on the move with laptops, smartphones, and tablets, businesses across the globe are already reaping the benefits of workforce mobility. But beyond the freedom from being confined to offices, laboratories, and workshops, there are other perks to having a mobile staff, which might not be immediately apparent.

Always Available

With VoIP features like call routing, number portability or Find and Follow incorporated into mobile VoIP apps, customers and suppliers are assured of round-the-clock assess to someone in your organization. Workers can make and receive calls from any device, anywhere – using the one phone number.

Intelligent routing systems can ensure that the person who answers a call is actually the one best qualified to do so – and with VoIP integration with contacts lists, customer data, and your knowledge base of products and services, workers taking calls on mobile devices have access to all the information they need to resolve issues and make sales.

Even if your corporate network goes down or internet connectivity fails, redundancy and Disaster Recovery (DR) measures put in place by your service provider can automatically re-route incoming calls to mobile or local phone numbers that you’ve designated.

Lower Costs Through BYOD

Bring Your Own Device or BYOD policies are becoming the norm, and for enterprises, having staff use their own hardware not only allows them to work with equipment they’re familiar with – it can also be a significant cost savings. There’s no need to purchase or maintain expensive office hardware, and with a sizable proportion of the workforce on the move or in the field, it may even be possible to reduce your office space requirements, and save on furnishings and rent.

Flexibility For Life

Though giving your employees the freedom to work on the road, outside “normal” office hours or at home actually increases productivity and benefits the enterprise, there’s an upside for the workers themselves, in terms of quality of life.

Greater flexibility gives workers the time and opportunity to create a more healthy work/life balance, and in turn fosters the notion that the company they work for actually cares about their well-being. This translates into increased job satisfaction, fewer sick days, and greater loyalty to the organization.

Visibility Through MWFM

Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM) has become something of a science, with tools to match. Cloud-based telephony platforms come with centralized administration consoles – user-friendly software that allows you to track the call status and on-the-job performance of personnel in the field, and assists in scheduling their duties and assigning tasks.

MWFM solutions increasingly come wrapped together with business analytics tools to help make sense of the real-time views given by the software into how well jobs are progressing, which staff members are meeting performance targets, and whether crucial timetables and compliance requirements are being met.

For employees in the field, mobile app deployments like user presence panels are an important part of the package. With these tools, workers always have an on-screen listing of their favorite or most frequently used contacts – together with real-time indicators of whether these people are available to take calls, busy, or absent.

Greater Productivity Through Time-Saving

Mobile Workforce Management and presence panels are only part of the picture. VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) allow organizations to smoothly blend a rich suite of telephony features with office, document-handling, and collaboration software based in the cloud.

Contact and messaging features like voicemail-to-text, voicemail-to-email, and intelligent routing enable workers to keep up to date with their vital communications, and never have to miss an important call.

Tools like chat and conferencing allow teams to brainstorm and compare notes in real time, across international boundaries. And seamless integration with cloud-based data storage and document creation platforms allows their input to be made on vital projects, without the delays formerly associated with work of this kind.

Mapping And Risk Management

Geo-location and personnel monitoring apps can be of great benefit to organizations handling security sensitive information, needing to comply with strict regulatory regimes, or whose workers must operate in difficult or potentially hazardous environments.

With some compliance standards requiring auditors to confirm through documentation and field inspection that certain work has been done or that certain environmental standards are being upheld, monitoring apps and mobile workforce management tools may be vital in assigning audited tasks to the most qualified personnel and providing the necessary evidence of performance – reducing headaches and eliminating the risk of sanctions or fines.

Geo-location technologies and digital video (DV) captured from mobile devices can provide real-time visual journals of the conditions encountered by workers at remote sites, disaster zones, and other difficult environments – an opportunity for observers at head office to offer instantaneous feedback or advice, and an aid for plotting safe routes and managing risks for future missions.

Breaking Down Barriers

Finally, having a workforce wholly or partly based in the cloud gives businesses a worldwide pool of talent to choose from. Multi-national teams of the best and brightest individuals may be instantaneously linked through the cloud’s integrated voice, video and data technologies – all at an affordable cost to the enterprise.