Supporting The Mobile Enterprise User - An Insider's View
2/4/2002 Author: Bruce Lounsbury, U.S. Telecoms analyst
Sprint PCS analyst Bruce Lounsbury wades through the nightmare of device support within the corporate mobility space
My previous analysis, “Enterprise mobility needs a reality check”, posed questions regarding who and how owners of mobile business capable devices were going to find support. Particularly, I asked, where support is for the wide range of devices, operating systems, and communication “standards” in play in the market today.
Within that analysis I took a peripheral look at the devices themselves, the applications being built for them, and those building and writing for these devices. I noted that many difficulties lay in the variety of operating systems and vagaries of multiple versions of the devices already available. I also pondered, however briefly, the impact that wireless technologies add to this support quagmire.
Now allow me, if I may, to give you an “insider’s view” of this support nightmare. Each device manufacturer has contact centers designed to offer multiple points of contact to their customers to address problems, issues, and questions that customers (or potential customers) might have. These contact points include in-the-flesh salespersons, Internet sites, email, “snail” mail, and telephone contact numbers. Each of these contact points require some person or persons to act upon the incoming support requests and to do so in a timely fashion.
Dangerously flirting with the word “easier” a single manufacturer, say Palm, only really has to support their own products. This means that they only have to deal with those products they have manufactured and/or sold over the past 4 years or so. Add to that the applications they sold with them or provided later from their web sites.
One might suspect then that this means they won’t be fielding questions such as, “My Handspring device won’t run the application I downloaded from your web site for Palm devices.” or “When I’m 300 km from my office out in the middle of no where, why can’t I get my email?” Naturally Palm certainly won’t have to spend any of their hard fought support budgets explaining why that 3rd party developed application isn’t working.
Or will they?
The fact of the matter is that they will. These manufacturers have staffs trained to deal with their own products and services. They are fluent in their offerings (yes, I know, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now) and the means by which to respond to the client. But what happens when they are compounded by outside influence? What happens when that user downloads an application of yours for a competitor’s device? Or what if they download a competitor’s application to your device?
Yes, its easy to tell the customer upset because the Palm application downloaded from your web site that it isn’t going to work on his Handspring device. Its easy to suggest that your web site clearly states that the applications were designed for Palm devices only. If you are lucky, this causes you no harm. In fact, educating the customer is always good, right?
Unfortunately that isn’t the case. Each call, each email, etc. that must be responded to costs the company money and time. This is money and time that can’t be spent answering the more “legitimate” questions of other customers.
Now let’s compound this. Let’s add wireless connectivity to this mix. First of all which brand are you going to go with? What technology do they use?
Europe, and in fact much of the world, has gone with GPRS technology. This will, supposedly, lead to EDGE, and eventually any number of other alphabetic witticisms. This technology has the advantage of being the one and only standard being addressed by many.
But about in the United States? Here there are two competing standards for wireless communications GPRS and CDMA2000 (not too mention the 802.x family of wireless networking). Compound this yet again by examining the various frequency spectrums that each technology uses and/or what each country is allocating.
How well does your cell phone work? Do you get call drops? Is it sometimes unclear? Do you seem to be billed for roaming seemingly all of the time? What does all this mean when added to the problems that a PDA represents itself? Where will this all end when we add all of the wonderful functions that 3G is supposed to give us?
The answers are neither simple nor timely but they will come. Device manufacturers and service providers are scaling up like never before to meet the customer, their most valuable resource, head on with the type of service and support we’ve come to deserve. Will we see that in 2002? Good question.
Let’s just say that we’re working on it.
