Trends 2016: Mobility to rule the roost

By Krishna Singh

Almost every small or medium enterprise is either thinking or evaluating some enterprise mobility solution today. In FY 2016, the focus would be on executing mobility projects, the sweet spot is sales force enablement or customer engagement enhancing solutions.

With ever increasing penetration of smart phones and spread of e-commerce user base, there is a general trend of technology adoption at grass root level. This is creating a strong pull for even traditional organizations to look for embracing mobility technology.

In terms of industry verticals, BFSI has always been the front-runner to adopt mobility technology to serve their customers better. Now, the entire digital banking proposition is being taken to next level with men less branch and tech assisted banking. Some of the more innovative banks are moving towards branch less banking by leveraging mobility technology. By and large BFSI segment is working towards reducing their operating expenses and offering better services to customers by leveraging mobility technology. What started with Tab banking is getting extended to many other facets of BFSI industry. Interestingly, insurance companies are leveraging mobility technology in their sales force enablement scenario, detailed policy information, premium calculation, lead management and many other functional aspect of insurance agent is getting more efficient by leveraging mobility technology.

Looking at the pharmaceuticals segment, the primary use case of mobility technology is going to be sales force enablement scenario with a focus on mobile-based CRM & CLM (Close loop marketing) tools.

Pharma companies are looking forward to replace and upgrade their customer engagement methodology. Instead of paper-based promotional tools, most of them are moving towards digital promotion using tablet PC’s.

Today, mobility is viewed as a strategic edge to the entire sales and marketing domain of the pharma sector. Mobility along with back-end analytics is giving the competitive edge to some of the large pharma companies and now even the mid size organizations are looking to embrace this.

Finally the automobile and service sector is going to leverage mobility to better customer service with many of the large companies already done with the pilot phase. There is a very high probability that next time when you take your car for servicing, the service engineer is using a tab to log your service request on shop floor and you are asked to download an app to get an update on your vehicle servicing.  Also, some of the companies are leveraging the mobility to bring automotive showroom to your doorstep on a tab.

In short, FY 2016 will be a mobility year with many sectors putting this as an strategic initiative including government, where "Digital India" is one of the flagship initiatives of our Prime Minister.

(The author, Krishna Singh, is founder & managing director, GlobalSpace Technologies)