Mobile CRM

There is a lot of talk about mobile customer relationship management (CRM) becoming a big trend in 2013.  It is already a dominant trend in some industries such as pharmaceuticals .  However, there is no consensus on what “mobile CRM” means.  Is it simply giving the user all of the CRM functionality on their phone or tablet that they have on their laptop?  That seems like a lot of information to digest on a pretty small screen.  And it’s a lot of functionality to sift through to find the few features that you rarely use when you’re out of the office.

Perhaps a better definition of Mobile CRM is delivering the most essential information that an employee needs to work outside the office in an easily consumable form for when they are in a car, walking through a building hallway, or standing in an elevator (assuming they can still get a darn signal after the doors close).

Let’s look at some past trends from the consumer side of technology.  In 2003, if you wanted to find a Chinese restaurant to eat dinner this evening after you picked your kids up from soccer practice, what did you do?  You sat down at your computer before you left the house, and typed “Chinese restaurant” into the search bar on your Google homepage (or Yahoo back then) and reviewed a list of search results where you could click through to a website that had lots of information.  What do you do today if you want to find a Chinese restaurant?  Well, many of us don’t bother to look before we leave the house.  We do it on our mobile device while we’re sitting in the bleachers waiting for our kids to finish with practice.  And are we typing that search into a search page?  No, probably not.  We’re typing it into the search bar in Google Maps because we want to see where those restaurants in the search results are in relation to us.  We don’t really want to see them in a list and we probably don’t want all the information that would be on a webpage. We just want to see how close they are and we probably just want to see when they’re open and how they were rated by patrons.  Those of us that like to add to the Karma pool on Yelp might even write a review of the restaurant after dinner.  And those of us that are really tech-savvy might even check in on FourSquare.  These are all apps that are delivered to us with a heavy dose of geographic context.  When we’re mobile, that’s how we naturally consume this sort of information.  Indeed, maps are one of the two most used applications on the iPhone and Android phone.

So if the consumer interacts with data in a geographic context while they’re mobile, why wouldn’t an outside salesperson who is driving around every day do the same thing?  He arguably needs it more than the consumer does.  On some level, one Chinese restaurant isn’t that different from another.  But missing one customer while you’re in the neighborhood could translate to some big revenue dollars lost.  So having a bird’s eye view of one’s territory can be very important for a salesperson.

Enterprise technology of course tends to lag consumer technology by a couple of years.  And up until fairly recently, it never really came close to the consumer user experience.  With the consumerization of enterprise IT, that’s changing, and it stands to reason that the consumption of enterprise data will eventually come around to the same method of mobile consumption seen in the consumer space.  Let’s see if that plays out over the next couple of years.

Aaron Tolson

Co-Founder | Badger Mapping

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