Effective Workforce Communications? Use the Fourth Mobile Service, Enterprise IM Communications

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, England, July 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile workforce communications has become a cornerstone of business. But why do so few corporates look beyond email, voice and SMS? Why are enterprise IM communications either not used at all or left for ad hoc user adoption? Either way it is almost exclusively relegated to internal PC to PC communication, despite the growing focus on enabling the mobile workforce, often including location-based communications.

Add IM and location-based communications to the mix and organisations finally have the ultimate mobile collaborative platform - SMS chat of course, but also location-based services, messaging, sharing pictures or push-to-talk services.

So why are more organisations not embracing this fourth mobile service? Tim Rea, CEO of Palringo www.palringo.com explains the value of a platform-independent workforce communications IM solution, integrated with location-based communications.

The ubiquity of mobile workforce communications has transformed the global economy in the past two decades. Organisations have looked to leverage increasingly robust and stable mobile technologies, such as location-based communications, to transform logistics, improve the quality of engineering field forces and enable effective remote working from sales to senior management.

Yet mobile tools still have their limitations. SMS is no good for any interactive communication and messages are not always reliably delivered, especially at peak time; emails may provide rapid one-to-many communication, but many field staff are uncomfortable picking out emails slowly on small keyboards; and voice calls can be expensive and are either very intrusive or result in inefficient telephone tag, with users all too often forced to leave multiple voice mail messages.

Instant Messaging (IM), in contrast, is immediate and interactive, yet not intrusive; and delivery is typically instantaneous – hence its huge popularity amongst consumers. In the business world however, IM remains primarily an internal PC-to-PC tool. Indeed while IM is sometimes part of the corporate communications platform, outside the financial markets, few organisations have created any robust enterprise IM communications strategy – the choice to use IM is ad hoc and employee-specific.

With this additional IM-based functionality, organisations can transform workforce communications and the way teams interact and collaborate.  Enterprise IM communications with instant picture sharing, for example, can enable field workers to gain immediate feedback from colleagues on the best way to address a specific engineering problem.  Rather than telephone or text each member of a team in turn, which is both time-consuming and expensive, customer service staff can use Vocal IM to an entire team or group to simultaneously ask questions regarding a specific customer. They can also use location-based communications services to attain an immediate view of every group member's location at any time, typically combined with their presence, degree of proximity and location-based information, enabling far more effective resource management.

However, whilst the technology benefits are compelling, the cost associated with deploying mobile IM workforce communications and location-based communications at an enterprise level has, to date, been significant. The key problem is market fragmentation. Organisations have two choices: either opt for a specific platform, requiring dedicated and expensive devices and significant contract costs; or allow staff to take responsibility for their own phone acquisition and contract but rely on publicly-used IM platforms. Not only does this risk personal IM overlapping with corporate communications, but most of the public IM platforms have added mobile accessibility to their platforms as an afterthought, resulting in relatively poor support for mobile IM.

So how can an organisation exploit the value of enterprise IM communications and location-based communications? The answer is a flexible, extensible workforce communications solution that can be implemented as a device-independent, operator-independent, hosted service. Such workforce communications solutions can also support secure internal communications with optional connections to popular public IM systems, if required, or restrict communications to a specific peer group.

It is no longer true that organisations require dedicated, expensive 'enterprise-grade' solutions that demand significant expenditure and serious effort to implement. By adding the fourth mobile service with location-based communications to the existing workforce communications platform, enterprises can finally achieve true mobile collaboration and deliver real productivity benefits through enterprise IM communications, whilst reducing costs from day one.

About Palringo

Palringo currently supports a large and growing user base that includes both consumers and enterprise customers.

There have been live enterprise IM communications users on Palringo since mid-2006 and in several cases, Palringo has put in place bespoke functionality to enable those companies to better integrate Palringo into their existing processes and infrastructure.

Palringo's enterprise customers tend to be particularly interested in:

Ability to operate in low coverage zones with sometimes unreliable data networks

Opportunity to run the same platform across multiple operators

Flexibility to move between different mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and J2ME)

Ability to work between desktop and mobile effectively (Windows PC and Mac in addition to mobile)

Innovative location-based communications features that focus on proximity and "where am I now" aspects rather than tracking (Can be disabled)

Integration of voice, text and picture messaging

Low footprint application that can effectively run in the background on most devices

SOURCE Palringo