We return to our mobile CRM roundtable to discuss ROI, security, and future features

Last month, members of our mobile CRM roundtable discussed the benefits of using mobile CRM, why companies are switching, and where they're seeing a return on their investment. Click here to read part one. Mobile CRM can reduce inefficiencies, keep everyone up to date on sales and customer activity, and increase your employees’ productivity in the field. In part two of our roundtable discussion, we'll see why mobile CRM is critical for organizations, talk about when you can expect to see ROI for mobile CRM, touch on security, and delve a bit into the future features these companies think they’ll be providing customers.

Mark Durst President, Salesplace www.salesplace.com Salesplace BlackBerry Edition CRM software keeps users dialed into customer information via BlackBerry devices. This application allows you to keep track of contacts, appointment schedules, and possible sales leads, no matter where you are—and features wireless sync capabilities for those time when you're off the connectivity grid Angie Hirata Worldwide Director of Marketing and Business Development, Maximizer Software www.maximizer.com Maximizer's mobile CRM solution enables on-the-road sales representatives to access sales forecasts and browse comprehensive customer notes and documents. The BlackBerry edition syncs with existing Maximizer CRM databases, allowing online and off-line browsing of customer records and the creation of new contacts. The mobile dashboard keeps users apprised of overall team performance, while one-click maps ensure convenient directions to your next appointment. Jeff Moloughney Senior Product Marketing Manager, FrontRange Solutions www.goldmine.com FrontRange's GoldMine CRM software manages information about customers, including contact and company details, meeting and call notes, email transactions, and day-to-day activities. GoldMine business functions manage marketing automation and sales-force automation, as well as customer service and support needs. GoldMine Mobile Edition for BlackBerry helps users manage their mobile CRM needs through an easy to deploy, secure, and easy to use mobile platform. Derek Warburton Vice President of Sales, TenDigits Software www.tendigits.com/ TenDigits' MobileAccess is a platform for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software package. It works alongside Dynamics to provide a familiar look and feel, and provides mobile CRM capabilities that include multi-window navigation and mobile application integration (email, web browser, and phone). MobileAccess' bi-directional synchronization capabilities allow users easy access to cached data while offline, and ensures that business information on both the mobile device and office database is always up to date. Wes Worsfold President, J2X Technologies www.j2x.ca J2X's Handheld Contact software allows wireless synchronization with Sage's ACT! customer management database, ensuring that contacts, notes, customer history, calendar entries, and action items are up-to-date. This secure solution increases users' face-time with customers while reducing dependence on the home office. J2X has also built over 25 custom BlackBerry applications since 2001, and offers mobile expense management (ExpenseLog Pro) and mileage tracking/reimbursement (MileageTracker Pro) solutions. John Carini iEnterprises www.ienterprises.com iEnterprises' Mobile Edge application extends existing applications, allowing wireless users to access key information from anywhere. Mobile Edge works with existing CRM systems such as Siebel, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM and Lotus Notes, providing a secure, easy to use, and highly configurable mobile solution that reduces downtime and empowers more users to utilize CRM more frequently in an effort to meet their clients' needs fully and efficiently.

BBCN: Let’s start with a few pointers for selecting a mobile CRM application. How should companies decide what solution to use?

SP: I think one of the things that makes mobile CRM extremely powerful is if you can provide flexibility within the tool itself. A smart investment is to look for a product that has the flexibility to be configured. Within SalesNOW, you can add unlimited custom fields to any record type. An administrator with 500 sales reps in the field can add a new field, right from the backend website. And that field is pushed out to all the users’ BlackBerry® [smartphones] immediately. Thirty seconds later the reps are now entering and updating a field that didn’t exist until then.

FR: Our clients' biggest concern is integrating the BlackBerry platform with their on-premise CRM application. They need to capture all those emails and activities that the BlackBerry device does so well, and couple it with their online CRM application. In the past, you had your online CRM world where you were managing your clients in one database, and you had the mobile world, which was sending out emails and activities for your clients, but the two were separated. Now we’re providing mobile CRM features and functionality on a BlackBerry device.

BBCN: What stakeholders should be involved in the decision-making process? Besides field staff, who benefits from mobile CRM?

SP: The head of marketing, the head of the sales team, the head of the customer service team: they need to do business analytics. They need to understand how effective each of their reps are. Your front-end tool, whatever it is, needs to feed your back-end tool, so companies can really take a look at their business intelligence, and start to make decisions on how they move and operate. Using mobile CRM to collect data, organize it from the field, and give the field access to data immediately, the sales reps and the customer service people have what they need to get their job done, and the executives and the management and even the local management have all the reports available to them, so they can make their business decisions.

BBCN: What setup and training are needed before reps can use mobile CRM? Is it less than if they were only using a desktop CRM solution?

J2X: It can be as short as 10 minutes. There are two components to our solution: a Windows application that’s installed on a computer or server that’s running their ACT solution. That piece is what extracts the data and information out of ACT, sends it through our synchronization service, to an application on the BlackBerry [smartphone]. The BlackBerry installation is a 60-second, over-the-air process. Once that’s completed, then they’re ready to start receiving their CRM data on their BlackBerry. So it’s really straightforward and simple.

BBCN: You've talked about time savings, which many companies count as part of their return on investment. How soon do you think companies can start seeing a ROI on their mobile CRM solution?

MM: From a qualitative standpoint, CRM on a mobile device has quickly shown a significant time savings. Our customers are able to say, “You know what, these guys are actually saving half an hour to an hour a day.” One client is saying that their salespeople are saving so much time every day that they’ve upped their sales quotas and sales targets. That’s pretty big.

FR: Each situation is different, but we're finding that as far as Goldmine Mobile or a mobile CRM application goes, ROI typically happens at three to six months out, sometimes a little bit shorter, depending on the industry.

BBCN: What are the benefits of mobile CRM from a security standpoint? People carry a lot of proprietary information on their smartphones.

10D: That’s one of the beauties of working with BlackBerry: we leverage the security that’s already inherent in the BlackBerry and BlackBerry® Enterprise Server platform. Once you're past the device password, you have access to email, to CRM. And third-party applications can’t leverage any external storage on a BlackBerry, so we're using only the 64MB of RAM on the device, which is encrypted, so you can't crack it. So the data on the device is protected, the data transmission is protected. You’re getting the exact same high level of security you’re getting for email. The reason customers have BlackBerry, more often than not, is security.

BBCN: Related to that is the need for dedicated IT support. What type of IT support is needed to keep mobile CRM up and running?

J2X: If they’ve installed and are running ACT, they can install our solution. We find that a lot of people just do it themselves. If there’s an IT department, they’ll probably handle that, mainly because they’re running ACT off of a shared server or a dedicated server. In that case, IT is often involved because the application’s installed at the server level, rather than on an individual's desktop or notebook computer.

FR: With any mobile application–it doesn’t have to be mobile CRM, it could be mobile ERP, mobile finance, mobile ordering–it has to be easily installed and easily deployed out to those road warriors. Because otherwise you’re placing a burden on the IT people. You essentially have 100 servers traveling all over the world on little BlackBerry devices, because you have 100 mobile sales reps. Given the increasing amount of infrastructure an IT manager has to manage, we want to make it as easy as possible for them not only to manage it but also deploy the application and easily secure it.

BBCN: How about working in mixed environments—working across different platforms?

10D: Because our partner is Microsoft®, we have to support their mobility platform as well. The benefit to us is that international companies might use BlackBerry in the United States and in Europe they might use Windows Mobile. But they only want one CRM mobility solution. Our solution allows for both from the same implementation: you can have a mix. In fact, you could even switch. If ten of their Windows Mobile users switch to BlackBerry, there’s no licensing impact. They just reallocate the license. It’s just a slight administrative task.

MM: With our solution, we have the Windows desktop component, the web access component, and the mobile component. So we usually talk to a prospect or client about the makeup of their customer-facing staff. “Customer-facing” being sales people, customer-service people, and marketing people. And then, of course, the executives and managers. Some industries are pretty heavy in terms of field salespeople, so with those kinds of organizations we would ask them about what kinds of technologies their field salespeople are using.

BBCN: Can you give us some examples about what people are asking for, beyond perhaps a typical mobile CRM solution?

10D: The other day a customer said, our guys have six appointments a day, and sometimes one of their customers cancels. Now they have two hours available. They’ve got potentially thousands of people they can call, and they want to fill that time. They’d like to be able to use a combination of CRM and mapping software to identify the closest 20 customers to them, or all the customers within a five-mile radius. They want to leverage the GPS capability of the device and send instructions to CRM to run that analytic and bring back a list of all those potential clients.

J2X: People are looking for information about their customers. Now, what information they’re looking for varies drastically. ACT can support up to 72 fields of information, so that’s different data sets about that customer. They can select from a whole range of things that they may want to know. We have people that sell electronic fences using this application. So they’re looking for information about when that wireless electric fence was installed, they’re looking for maintenance information, even product level information about what was sold and how it’s to be serviced.

BBCN: What’s one segment that’s surprised you by growing, and taking on mobile CRM?

SP: Banking, financial, medical. Medical sales professionals and financial sales professionals are extremely well-paid, and their time is very valuable. Especially when you get into enterprise implementations, the end users are often highly paid, highly skilled individuals. They don’t have time to waste. Their sales reps are selling million-dollar equipment. Every call report or piece of data that rep enters is extremely valuable, and will affect projections and important business decisions. We’ve done a lot of work with government, too.

SP: It just totally shocks me when I see the types of different people who realize mobile technology can help them. Anyone from artists trying to coordinate their schedules to one-man or one-woman companies. If you look at the small- and medium-business segment, the diversity is staggering.

FR: Anybody nowadays who wants to provide better customer service, internally or externally, is adopting a mobile application. Why? Because when you’re performing customer service, you’re typically doing that in front of a client. And especially in a down economy, one way you differentiate yourself from the competition is in your level of customer service.

BBCN: And what changes can we expect to see from mobile CRM soon?

10D: Most people don’t use mobile CRM to the degree it could be utilized today. There may be information that’s not in CRM but that’s contextual or associated with CRM. Shipping information, inventory, accounts payable, accounts receivable: they're not housed in CRM, they're in their other ERPs, but they're related and there are very specific points they want to pull out. We’re already doing this with some of our customers; I can see this being expanded.

J2X: I think in the short term our customers are asking us for integration. By integration, they’re looking at how the mobile CRM works alongside other things that they have available on their BlackBerry [smartphones]. The most common and obvious are calls, emails, and mapping. For example: I go to a trade show. I don’t want to have to send emails pushing out to people, “I’m at this trade show, let’s meet.” I want to have that information fed to me automatically. So while I’m there, I'm getting real-time information about my contacts' whereabouts, their activities, even what meetings they're attending.

FR: We’re really looking at doing automated processes and adding the mobile aspect to it–ordering books or obtaining forecasts. So now, for example, the mobile person isn’t writing things on a notepad or a piece of paper, going back into the office, and handing the order or the invoice to someone else to enter it into the system. Instead, they're initiating that process from the mobile device itself.

BBCN: And in the long term?

10D: Forward-thinking and visionary companies, wherever they can see the opportunity to enhance productivity and enhance uptime in salespeople, will want new things from mobile CRM. And either companies like us will think of them in advance, or the customers will come to us and say, this is our challenge, can you find a way to make it work? It’s not a static industry; it’s always evolving.

SP: Document management is a big thing for the future of CRM. With document management, an insurance adjuster in the field can take a picture with their BlackBerry [smartphone]'s camera, upload it, and store it as a document right in that case file. All they needed was their BlackBerry. People are saying, wow, you've got a camera in the BlackBerry now, you have all these additional features; what else can we do?

MM: One thing we'll definitely be focusing on is having both an online and an offline application. You'll store your CRM records on the BlackBerry or the BlackBerry's SD card, so that information is available even if you're out of range or on a plane. Customers really like that, particularly in B2B manufacturing sales, your salespeople are often in rural areas with spotty coverage. They need to have that data available to them even if there aren't enough bars on their phone, so to speak.

Resources

• Visit the participating companies at the links provided.
• Check the BlackBerry Business Resource Center for webcasts and whitepapers.

Which comes out on top?

Businesses with field employees have several options when it comes to mobile devices, including smartphones and ruggedized handhelds and laptops. Picking the right mobile device for your operation requires understanding the needs of your field employees and how they interact with their mobile devices. For employees who operate in harsh environments, ruggedized devices are an obvious choice. However, for most users, a BlackBerry® smartphone has great advantages in form factor, usability, and cost. Research In Motion (RIM) wanted to know more about the difference between BlackBerry smartphones and ruggedized devices, so we commissioned ABI Research to study how companies are choosing their mobile devices. Here’s what we learned:

For those who do not require extreme ruggedness, smartphones typically provide a superior user experience to a ruggedized device. Ruggedized devices can weigh as much as 25 ounces, whereas smartphones generally weigh 4 ounces or less. Also, because smartphones tend to be more attractive than ruggedized devices, companies have reported greater utilization rates from employees who are better able to view the smartphone as their own.

BlackBerry smartphones also have several advantages in usability over ruggedized devices. For one, ruggedized devices frequently only have a battery that is designed to last for the duration of one shift, while BlackBerry smartphones have batteries which can last up to several days without a charge. Smartphones are also extensible with a wide variety of accessories, including durable cases, Bluetooth barcode readers, printers and signature pads. Because these accessories are available—but not built in—smartphones can be flexible and powerful, without becoming bulky or heavy.

Perhaps the most important factor to consider is the difference in total cost of ownership between BlackBerry smartphones and ruggedized devices. While rugged devices cost $1,500 and up per handset, smartphones cost around $200 dollars, on average, meaning that even with a moderately higher replacement rate, BlackBerry smartphones are much cheaper to deploy. Also, the flexibility to extend a smartphone with Bluetooth® accessories, which are affordable and can be used with multiple smartphones as they’re needed, means additional savings in hardware costs.

The cost to deploy different mobile solutions

The study by ABI Research found that the savings associated with using smartphones instead of ruggedized devices can be dramatic. The analysis found that companies using a BlackBerry smartphone solution pay 14 to 88 percent less for their mobile solutions than companies that use ruggedized handsets and laptops. These savings come from the smartphones’ lower hardware costs, as well as increases in efficiency owing to smartphones’ constant connectivity and portability.

Although ruggedized handsets can be excellent solutions in circumstances that call for extreme durability, a mobile solution is only effective to the extent that employees in the field use it.

Download the report on BlackBerry vs Rugged Devices total cost of ownership »

Create groups, share important files and more!

BlackBerry® Messenger offers a fast way to stay in touch with your colleagues, friends and family—and the version 5.0 update makes BlackBerry Messenger even more powerful.

What's New:

• Share multiple files at once—make collaboration easy
• Allow members of your group to share their BlackBerry calendars with each other
• Send text messages to non-BlackBerry users from within the
  BlackBerry Messenger application
• Create and connect with BlackBerry Groups; create separate groups for different teams you work with, assign tasks and share pictures and key dates
• Scan a user's unique bar code to easily add the person as a new contact
• Personalize with a display picture

Whether your BlackBerry deployment is 5 or 500 smartphones, the BlackBerry Community Support Forums members are there to help, 24x7. Need to find someone with a similar network configuration to trade tips with? Jump on the forums, ask the community members—or even help an IT colleague in need!

Do end users come to you with questions about how to perform basic functions on their BlackBerry smartphones, such as change a ring tone or set up personal email? Send them to the new BlackBerry channel on YouTube. There, they’ll be able to watch how-to videos on a growing collection of topics that will teach them to complete a variety of tasks on their own.

Mac users rejoice! A Research In Motion (RIM)-developed, full-featured desktop sync application for Macs is now available. And it has a look and feel that’s similar to what you see on your Mac right now. Highlights include:

• Two-way sync of contacts, calendar, tasks, iTunes® playlists and notes
• Compatibility with iTunes® for music sync
• Back up and restore functionality, including automatically scheduled backups and optional encryption
• The ability to add and remove applications

BlackBerry® Desktop Manager is the first app that gives you the ability to sync your BlackBerry smartphone with a variety of features on your Apple® computer. The app will run on Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Leopard) or higher and is available at www.blackberry.com/mac.

Simplify Bluetooth & web browsing

In this edition of the BlackBerry Connection® newsletter we show you how to connect to your Bluetooth®-enabled peripherals and provide some tips on how to personalize your browser.

We’re bringing you Bluetooth and browser tips and tricks this month. To see even more tips from our Personal Edition newsletter,
click here »

Bluetooth Tips

With Bluetooth, your BlackBerry® smartphone can wirelessly communicate with tons of useful peripherals, including headsets, printers, and keyboards. In this section, we provide some tips that let you manage all your Bluetooth devices, including how to enable Bluetooth on the phone and how to connect it to new peripherals.

Turn on Bluetooth technology

On the Home screen, press the Menu key and click Manage Connections. Select the Bluetooth checkbox. To turn off Bluetooth technology, clear the Bluetooth checkbox.

The BlackBerry® Visor Mount Speakerphone VM-605 uses Bluetooth® to let you enjoy calls and your favorite music from your BlackBerry® smartphone with the convenience and sound quality of your car's FM stereo system.

Change the pairing name for your BlackBerry smartphone

On the Home screen, press the Menu key and click Options and then Bluetooth. Press the Menu key and click Options. Adjust the name of your Bluetooth device to personally identify it.

Search for other Bluetooth devices

On the Home screen, press the Menu key and click Manage Connections. Click Set Up Bluetooth and click Search. Simply click the desired device and provide the appropriate passkeys.

Application tips

Applications are what let you add more functionality to your BlackBerry smartphone. Understanding applications means always having the right tool at your disposal.

Find new apps

Visit BlackBerryAppWorld.com on your desktop computer or mobile.blackberry.com on your BlackBerry smartphone to download BlackBerry App World™.

Switch Applications

When running an application, press the Menu key, click Switch Applications and then an application icon.

Browser Tips

Being away from your desktop computer doesn’t mean you have to give up your usual browsing habits. With your BlackBerry smartphone web browser, the whole Internet is at your fingertips. In this section, we’ll show you how to customize and use your BlackBerry smartphone browser the same way you use your non-mobile browser, with bookmarks, custom homepages, display preferences, and a whole bunch of hotkeys for faster navigation.

Visit a web page

From the Home screen, click the Browser icon, type in the web address and click the trackball or touch screen to retrieve the site.

Add a bookmark

On a web page, press the Menu key, click Add Bookmark and adjust the name if desired. Then press the Menu key and click Add.

Add a Bookmark Folder

In the BlackBerry® Browser, press the Menu key, click Bookmarks and then highlight a bookmark folder. Press the Menu key and click Add Subfolder.

Change the default browser view

In the BlackBerry Browser, press the Menu key, click Options then General Properties. Change the Default View field, press the Menu key and Save Options.

Set your browser home page

To set the BlackBerry Browser home page, from the Browser, press the Menu key. Click Options, then Browser Configuration, and type your desired web site in the Home Page Address field.

BlackBerry Browser font settings

In the browser, click Options. Click General Properties and then set your font preferences.

Refresh a web page

While on a web page, press the R key. You can also press the Menu key and click Refresh.

Forward a web page address

On a web page, press the Menu key, click Send Address and choose the method in which you want to deliver the address.

Browser Shortcuts