The Importance of Embracing Mobile Communication In Business and How It Can Increase Your ROI
If you want your business to achieve greater results, you should embrace mobile communication, as it helps businesses expand and become more flexible. Mobile technologies let businesses communicate and engage with their employees in an effective way, ensuring business continuity.
Mobile communication has been instrumental in shaping a new era of business, and by embracing it you can save a lot of time – and time is money, especially when it comes to business. One key to running a successful business is staying connected to your employees. Mobile communication has the potential to include every employee, thereby evolving your company’s messaging into a more robust and well-informed business model.
Landline-based phone calls, bulletin boards, desk-stationed hardware, and so on are becoming relics of the past. You should harness mobile phones in your business as mobile communication platforms are becoming increasingly mainstream.
Mobile technologies helped many businesses including accounting, marketing, finance, sales, education, human resources, and more survive the onslaught caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobile communication has never been more important for businesses to run smoothly.
6 Reasons Why Your Business Should Embrace Mobile Technologies
Here are six ways mobile communication can benefit your organization.
#1. Saves Valuable Time and Money
- Mobile communication helps cut down on business travel costs, as you don’t need to travel long distances to attend intercompany or client meetings. You can schedule online meetings via mobile communication and cloud-based providers such as Skype, Zoom, WebEx Meetings, Team Viewer, Zintel, and so on.
- Even when workers are all within the same urban area, many companies arrange cab rides for their employees or provide travel allowances. Mobile technologies allow employees to carry out some of their tasks remotely (this will be explained in detail in Section #3), allowing you to cut down on their travel costs.
- Mobile apps simplify vendor management, thereby ensuring that you don’t need to meet your vendors often to pay invoices or gather important details.
- Building and maintaining professional connections can be time-consuming. Mobile-friendly social apps can help you maintain social connections in a more organic way. Businesses that use smartphones to network have a huge business advantage over those that don’t.
#2. Improves Team Coordination
- Mobile technology offers secure file sharing, allowing employees to access company information anytime.
- An employee can create spreadsheets, documents, and presentations, and save them on Google drive. The employee can give instant access to his/her teammates and they will be able to access, review, and modify the materials.
- The instant access and the option of working on the materials simultaneously get collaborative work done effectively, thereby improving team coordination, and resulting in a better organization.
- Mobile technologies also allow employees from different departments to work together, resulting in increased collaboration. Problems can be solved quickly as more minds get involved, increasing the company’s value proposition.
#3. Provides Great Workplace Flexibility
- Mobile technology goes wherever the user goes, consisting of portable two-way communications systems and computing devices that are connected by a piece of accompanying network equipment.
- The ability to connect anywhere, at any time is what makes smartphones invaluable, especially when you are traveling. All you need is a Wi-Fi signal and you can access a multitude of media and services. If you are supposed to travel to a different city for a business meeting urgently, you can delegate the responsibility of leading your team to someone else. With a host of apps at your disposal, smartphones help you keep track of what’s happening in your team.
- Thanks to mobile technologies, a workplace is no longer confined to a space where your employees are stuck day after day. Internet-enabled devices such as smartphones and tablets allow employees to carry out some of their tasks such as sending emails, attending online meetings, making presentations, and sharing files securely from the comfort of their homes, cafes, or even the great outdoors. In fact, many people prefer tablets over laptops as they can be carried everywhere easily, making them a great tool for preparing impromptu sales presentations for prospective customers.
- When employees get the opportunity to implement some of their tasks from their homes, they experience lower stress levels, as they don’t need to worry about staying overtime in their workplace to attend meetings or any other tasks that can be done via mobile devices. This results in employee satisfaction, which ultimately leads to an increase in productivity.
- Working in a more flexible environment will help your employees perform better, which in turn will help you achieve your business goals and fulfill your vision. They are less likely to look for another job, and more likely to be engaged and innovative.
- User-friendly smartphone features and device familiarity make the employees comfortable, and they are more likely to clock in extra hours and perform additional tasks to propel the organization.
#4. Speeds Up Responsiveness
- Responsiveness is a combination of value and speed. If your company is able to provide value-based information quickly, you are actually moving a step closer to convincing prospective customers to make a purchase.
- Access to mobile technology results in enhanced responsiveness, as it allows the employees to respond quickly and manage their work easily.
- Quick response and easy management can be attributed to the fact that employees have multiple ways to get in touch with their team members, which means they have many ways to receive notifications and respond to queries and relevant communications.
- Smartphones allow employees to check emails, send messages, and even log in to their work portals and the company’s network to read and review materials. Instant messaging platforms such as WeChat, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and so on allow an employee to relay ideas or other important information to his/her teammates quickly.
- Mobile email is an integral part of business, and access to corporate emails on mobile devices helps improve employee efficiency, access to new business opportunities, and closer work with customers and clients.
#5. Identifies Potential Customers More Easily
- According to Statista, there are about 6 billion smartphone users in the world today, which is about 83% of the world’s population. This is a strong reason for you to embrace mobile technology, as it can help your business reach a wider audience.
- Through mobile marketing campaigns, you can identify potential customers and offer promotional deals to them.
- Mobile marketing helps businesses identify their potential customers easily compared to traditional marketing. Today, people carry their smartphones wherever they go. Through location-based services, their data can be collected and you can keep track of what they search on Google. If they search for something that is related to what your company offers, you can show them relevant ads.
- Mobile marketing will not only help your business reach a wider audience, but it can also convert many individual users into potential customers, thereby increasing the ROI of your business.
#6. Allows You to Take Customer Orders and Payment More Easily
- If you are running a business like a restaurant, you can streamline the sales process by using tablets or smartphones to take down your customers’ orders instead of writing them down on a piece of paper. With less room for error, it also gives a good opportunity for your servers to get more friendly with customers, thereby boosting their tips and your sales.
- Don’t forget that the majority of people order food through top food mobile apps such as Uber Eats, GrubHub, Seamless, and so on. So, if you want to increase your repeat business opportunities and improve referral rates, adopting mobile apps for your business is the way to go about it.
- Businesses need a flexible payment solution, and using mobile devices to accept payments from customers makes it easier for them to complete transactions.
- Businesses can choose various methods, platforms, and tools such as PayPal, Square, and more to take payments from customers’ credit and debit cards so you no longer have to send back prospective customers who don’t have cash.
How Mobile Communications Can Be Integrated Into Your Business Setting
We have seen numerous benefits of using mobile technology in workplaces. Here are some ways you can truly let the benefits of mobile communication unfold.
- Mobile chat groups. Group chat applications allow employees to send instant messages to their colleagues simultaneously. Such apps allow them to converse privately and securely. Some of these apps have interfaces and features that are designed specifically for smartphone screens. File sharing, ease of navigation, search and filtering functionality, and so on are some important features you need to look for in a group chat app. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and Chatwork are some of the most commonly used group chat platforms.
- VOIP phones. Voice Over Internet Protocol phones have evolved well to meet modern-day business needs by offering chat, voice, video, and other useful features. Through their assigned, internet-connected VOIP number, employees can send and receive communications across their mobile devices, and the only requirement for this is that they need to be connected to their internet. This also allows you to place phone calls and hold conferences for your business. Another advantage of using VOIP for your business is that it is cost-effective, as it can provide more savings through lower operating costs.
- Voice assistant-enabled smartphones. Voice assistant-enabled smartphones and devices such as Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana can bring more convenience to your workforce. Voice Assistants can be very useful for coordinating schedules and executing workflows. They help employees stay connected, thereby improving their work productivity.
Final Thoughts
In this advanced digital era, mobile devices have become a very crucial part of day-to-day business activities and processes. Using outdated technology and equipment will make your business irrelevant, causing it to remain behind those businesses that have migrated to new technology. In today’s competitive business world, you should embrace mobile communication for your business if you want to remain relevant and stay in line with your competitors.