Employee Experiences on Mobile Workforce Devices.
TRANSCRIPT
Brett Cooper
One of the questions we get a lot, you know, is really thinking about the end-user experience and improving the employee experience on mobile devices. Over the last ten years, our company has built apps all over the world for different organizations, and one of the things we’ve seen an uptick in is people caring about their employees a lot more in their employee experience. So it used to be all about the customer, and now there’s a lot more investment where there’s the Home Depot’s and Chick-Fil-A’s of the world have really done an incredible job investing in their employees. And the end result is they have happy, happier customers. So for us, we really think about it from the mobile standpoint. So we build a lot of mobile apps and think about how we make the experience better for end users. And there are really four key areas that will typically share experiences or give guidance around.
The first one is going to be the actual tooling your employees use, really thinking about, you know, how do you measure that? How do you know what people are using? How do you get visibility into it? And really, the biggest way there is analytics. There’s a lot of great analytics tools out there. You know, Splunk was probably the first ones were submitted pieces. Their tool called mint, zebra, and Honeywell, and a lot of the other manufacturers started to include great analytics on their devices. So taking advantage of those and knowing what employees are doing and getting visibility into that. So it’s important for us; we included a lot of analytics in our tooling and support for that.
The second area we see a lot is really around your support processes. So you have people that are they want to get their jobs done, they’re using these mobile devices, they want to do their work as effectively as possible. And for them, one of the things is when they call the help desk, they don’t want to have to send the help desk within 30 minutes; they want to really get on the helpdesk and get their issue knocked out. So for us, really, we think about things like spending money on remote control, having a back to the analytics and visibility, your help desk, they’ll look at the device and see what changes have happened on there in the last three or four days.
And, you know, the third area we think about is speed and its speed. It’s difficult to articulate. But for us, it’s, you know, if something is fast, you know, something is slow. So when we go do sidewalks, a lot of things we look at are what people are doing over and over again. And those are some of the most important tasks to try to optimize and reduce. And, you know, there’s a lot of big software packages out there, a lot of green screen stuff. And I see people doing things where it’s ten clicks to do an activity that really should be one click. So really thinking about how do you optimize those, and there’s a big math formula there, you got 10,000 employees are doing ten clicks instead of one, you know, times 20 seconds times how many times to do the day it gets it gets really expensive, really fast for them.
And then the last area, the fourth area, we see a lot of improvement and thinking about the end-user experience is communication tools. So these mobile devices have historically been used for scanning things and are really looking at data, and they’re becoming a lot more multi-use devices. So to be able to pick it up and take phone calls using VoIP because, really, it’s been around for 15 years, but it’s becoming something that’s a lot more predominant. And you know, there’s a lot of tools, and as things like Slack and teams and people start to build in the communication expertise on these devices, that did become a lot more powerful for the end users.
You know, and I think for us, you know, the user experience really comes back down to, you know, you have happy employees, yet they’re, they’re gonna treat your customers better. You’re also gonna have better retention of your employees. So really investing in the experience and how people use devices is incredibly important, or it’s gonna be more and more important as time goes on.
