Its no secret that Google has taken enterprise business from Microsoft in recent years. G-Suite** launched (2006) 5 years before Office 365 (2011) and established a serious foothold for shared spreadsheets, docs, files and mail.
If you’ve used G-Suite, you will be familiar with the tips and popups they use both on Web and Mobile to educate you about features.
Whilst G-Suite is a classy product, they still have used this education layer of tips and tours to help users get up to speed – we’ve reported some G-Suite examples in previous posts.
Consumer Grade UX
G-Suite is an example of Enterprise SaaS its at its best (you can imagine how many millions have been spent on Google docs!), they’ve built a product set that can be used by consumers and has survived the furnace of over a decade of use.
However, Google realized that when it comes to the Enterprise, users still require some help to get onboarded with products their employer wants them to use.
To solve this, G-Suite also has a Chrome plugin specifically designed for companies to onboard and skill-up their employees.
The G-Suite tours provide a comprehensive set of features: tips, walk-throughs, coachmarks and videos and comes from the acquisition of https://www.synergyse.com. This fills a gap between seperate docs and Microsoft’s Clippy (we spoke about here).
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Other Apps that are used in the enterprise often need walk-throughs or tours to explain features to users. Examples that I’ve seen are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Workday – enterprises are using tips/tours for:
reducing training costs
increasing productivity
educating remote staff
The problem has been (until Contextual) the same can’t be achieved in the Mobile Apps that Enterprise uses….AND…large quantities of staff are now predominantly mobile.
Are “docs” dead?
In the past nobody actually read the manual. Now, we can expect that a mobile-on-the-go workforce or user base will never go hunting around for docs.
The solution is:
have Apps so simple they need no explanation (e.g like a shopping app)
deliver feature-rich Apps but with Consumer-grade UX (as discussed above)
Provide contextual help via tips, tours, tooltips (as shown by G-Suite Training)
Add some videos
The best solution is a blend of (2), (3) and possibly a sprinkling of (4). Some companies use videos or animated-GIFs but we think they should be used sparingly.
Generally load times, delays, resolution makes them sub-optimal. More importantly – looping animated GIFs are funny with cats, but when it shows someone picking from a drop-down list and scrolling around, its plain boring or confusing!
Follow Google’s lead
We’ve previously explained that Google, Facebook, Dropbox and other successful Apps all use tips even though they have huge teams of Product Managers, Data Scientists and Developers. Simply put, Tips and Walk-throughs work for increasing user engagement and understanding.
The G-Suite Training example is great but not all companies can go out and acquire a company like Synergise 🙂 Luckily Onboarding products like Contextual are economical, functional, easy to use and considerably cheaper!
Apple is making concerted efforts to establish a foothold in the enterprise mobility space; they have enlisted help from big delivery (Accenture, Deloitte) players and platforms (Jamf, MobileIron, Epic etc) to position iOS as the preferred platform for enterprise mobility.
With the consumer market reaching saturation (shown by weaker iPhone and iPad sales) Apple can leverage its popularity with employees to impact enterprise deployment decisions. They face challenges in enterprise with the ongoing refresh of Microsoft Surface for Windows laptops/desktops and Android for Windows CE ruggedized devices.
Source: boston-technology.com
One example of Apple’s enterprise push is the healthcare sector and a great deployment is University California San Diego Jacobs Medical Centre, who have deployed iPads and Apple TV in every patients room.
This initiative enables patients to:
Access their medical records
Contact nursing staff
Play games and watch movies
Stay connected through social apps
Doctors and nurses also use Apple devices as work tools, decoupling them from their work desks, enabling them to focus more on caring for the patients. Some of the other benefits of doctors and nurses using mobile devices are:
Doctors can now use iPads to show patients scans results and plans for their procedures.
Real Time access to patient treatment history
Real Time monitoring and alerts for at risk patients
Improve productivity of all health staff
Removes friction from care process
Improve collaboration between doctors
Source: Epic
Apple has delivered a rich set of capabilities but the challenge is to ensure that patients and staff are onboarded and understand their Apps quickly. For patients, while their time at hospital may be short, it is important that it is hassle free.
For employees, applications are often complex but need to be helpful, quicker and more useful than their old paper and desktop based systems. Onboarding software like Contextual enables teams to simplify and accelerate App uptake in the enterprise by adding walkthroughs and tips – this reduces the learning curve in time critical environments.
The size of the global mobile workforce is approximately 59% of the whole workforce or approximately 1.76 billion, but only a small percentage of this workforce currently uses mobile devices to complete work related tasks.
This shows there is a huge opportunity for growth in the enterprise use of mobile Apps. According to Deloitte*, in Europe alone there is the possibility that 45% or 100 Million workers could use their mobile device as their primary work device.
However until recently, companies have been focused on creating shiny consumer applications and haven’t focused on creating mobile enterprise Apps. As companies start to develop more enterprise Apps, the way that people work will be transformed and the process benefits of mobile technology will blossom**.
Challenges in Mobilized Workforce
The early challenges of remote mobile devices were intrastructure and security based. Issues like App deployment, device theft protection, remote wipe, BYOD lockdown etc. These have largely have now been solved with MDM/EMM*** platforms like “Mobile Iron” making this easy for corporates.
With this solved the next phase of deploying Apps and Onboarding is key – The challenge will be educating the mobile workforce on how to use and get the most out of the applications.
Delloite’s study states employees most benefited by B2B mobile Apps are low skilled/high turnover staff and skilled industrial employees that work in the field.
These types of roles will get the most value out of using mobile Apps if they are onboarded to Apps effectively. They have a greater need for company and job related information, communication with peers and information about suppliers, stock levels. Many of the applications will be central to:
Their job function
Customer satisfaction
Inclusion in corporate news and culture (which is a growing issue with de-centralized workforces of all types).
Use Cases
Credit: safetyculture.com
Two examples below to explain common Enterprise App use cases:
Field workers, such as builders, telco technicians or sales staff. They will be able to perform tasks from their mobile devices such as:
Accessing job related information in real time
They need to be able to log the work they have done
See what jobs are next and link to calendar
Check on stock levels internally and from external suppliers.
Manage timesheets, leave requests, expense claims
And communicate with their peers
This process wants to be as smooth as possible, teaching the workers how to get the most out the Apps while they are using them is a great way of doing this. Companies might deploy their own Apps but examples of commercial Apps are: Handshake (Sales Orders), Safetyculture (Quality and Inspections) and of course Salesforce1 (sales/CRM)
Retail staff, mobile devices are enabling them to be decoupled from fixed POS desks, they can now complete tasks on their phone such as:
process sales,
look up stock,
Communicate with employees
Manage job allocation
Automate timesheet management.
This will lead to more knowledgeable sales staff that can add more value to the company. Companies might deploy their own Apps but examples of commercial Apps are: Deputy (retail staff and rostering) and Tulip (Retail Assisted selling, on-floor checkout).
There are many other sectors and use-cases undergoing change:
Previously single purpose platforms using ruggedized devices for deliveries are going through a generational change:
From Windows CE or proprietary software to Android Tablets. This is largely being driven by a new strategic direction from Microsoft.
The worker now has access to a broader range of Apps on their work device.
Access to delivery information from tablet or even the ability to link deliveries to phone details and calling.
Warehousing and logistics now has access to Tablet devices that support RFID, NFC, Barcode
Credit: zebra.com
Why Onboarding is Important
In both of these examples the challenges will be similar:
Get the staff to use the mobile Apps
Teaching the workers how to use the Apps.
Traditionally costs of onboarding a new staff member was restricted to their core job function, they were physically trained by bringing them into a regional office to undergo induction. With technology and competition a worker can get started completely remotely and be productive earlier AS LONG AS they get some education and on-boarding in the Apps.
Deployment and Rollout
Having a well thought out onboarding process and inApp training helps to solve the second challenges. This is where Contextual can help, by adding educational in App walk-throughs, pop ups, carousels and tooltips, you can reduce the new user friction by reducing the learning curve for new staff.
This also allows the App developers to focus on the core functionality/features of the products, while the line-of-business managers (or process owners) can work on improving engagement.
Why not Web?
Lastly, many (or most!) enterprises have recently re-built Apps for their workforce to access via a browser – write once, run anywhere (The older folks amongst us will remember the browser based terms “Intranet” and “Extranet”). But – a high percentage of recently rebuilt server applications will already support the REST Framework making them close to ready for Mobile Apps to access and present data to users.
The major benefits of Mobility via Apps over “extranet” browser UI’s are:
Great UI and gestures
Local storage and caching for speed
Continued operation in low connectivity areas (rural coverage, urban deadspots, building like lifts)
What about the ‘gig’ economy?
I did have gig economy in the back of my mind whilst writing this, we did do some validation with Uber and Lyft for the onboarding of their drivers. These businesses which offer elastic on-demand drivers, food deliveries, child-minding, dog-walkers and odd-jobs are rapidly becoming real businesses and will need the ability to rapidly onboard the remote elastic staff to their Apps. The recent court cases with Uber imply that the relationship is company<–>contractor, so the need for “intranet” App access is likely less than enterprises.
Gig companies also seem strongly bifurcated from traditional enterprise. I can’t imagine a major cable company or electricity utility out-sourcing ad-hoc to TaskRabbit or Airtasker for installs 🙂
So it would be interesting to know which enterprises do use gig products as extranet employees. If you know any examples, please drop me a note (david at pointzi dot com).
** This may be old news to some of our development partners – but the wheels of industry move slowly and there are many business processes yet to be re-engineered for remote workers with mobile devices.
*** MDM – Mobile Device Management and EMM – Enterprise Mobility Management.
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