There are still plenty of small business directors who are sceptical about mobile working. Generally they worry about the security of the devices and are not convinced of the business benefits. But there are striking exceptions, like Newhall Publications which is enthusiastically equipping its sales force with XDAs - combined phone/personal digital assistant devices.
The company, which publishes a low-profile monthly women's magazine called Candis (candis.co.uk), generates subscriptions through a door-to-door sales force. The magazine has a healthy readership of about 300,000 but the company was finding it increasingly difficult to get a grip on actual sales figures and the performance of individual reps.
After a ten-day pilot where a select number of the sales force tried XDAs, provided by O2, (o2.co.uk) the company decided to roll them out across the country. About 120 XDAs are now being used by the company's sales force and more are being introduced.
Chris Harman, Newhall's IT director, explains that the sales reps use their new XDAs to input direct debit information and to check customer addresses. The information is not held on the XDA but is fed via GPRS to a web server and then downloaded by the firm's central office. He says it used to take between 14 to 21 days to process paperwork and send out customers a complimentary copy of the magazine. Now, with the help of the XDAs, it takes between five and seven days. "Customers are getting the product that much quicker so retention has improved," says Harman. "This has helped to keep the flow of the sales going." At central office, they can log the direct debit details and have them confirmed within a few days.
The data generated by the mobile devices is also providing the company with a quicker and clearer picture of overall sales results. "One of the drivers was accuracy of sales information. We were being told we would get 2,000 sales a week and we would get 1,800," Harman says. Previously, regional managers would have to spend about half a day ploughing through paperwork in order to validate banking details that sales teams had generated.
The regional managers now have access to an online reporting system and they can see how many sales have been put through every day on the XDAs so they can quickly see how many sales an individual has achieved. "They can ring them up and be proactive. Sales management has been greatly improved."
The XDA was chosen as the model for the company because of the stylus it offers and the fact that a small amount of keying in is required. But getting staff to adopt them after years of relying on paper processes required a lot of effort. "There were issues," says Harman. "Some of our sales force has been with us for 30-plus years and have never touched a computer. We had to make sure the training we gave them and the system we developed was very simplistic and easy to use."
Training sessions were organised in each region of the country and sales team members were given hands-on individual training to help familiarise them with the new devices. To back up the training, the company offered telephone support for anyone who encountered any difficulties.
The sales team still uses paper to gather the initial information from customers and then inputs the details into their XDAs usually when they are in their company cars.
Harman says they were not sure how customers would react to the data being pumped into the XDA in front of them and they also had concerns about how durable the devices might be if they are used outside in bad weather conditions.
The company is now considering making email available through the XDAs and is interested to look at emailing staff details of their sales performances. An idea is that the sales force could be prompted to log on to a site to see where they stand in a performance league of all sales team members.
For any company which is considering a mobile solution of this kind, Harman believes a pilot is essential to demonstrate the benefits to the rest of the business. He adds that it's also important to think through the security issues. The XDAs simply act as a mechanism for reporting sales and don't store any data themselves. This means that if a device went missing, information would not be lost. Harman adds that the solution is also cost-effective. He calculates that the monthly line rental for an XDA is less than the cost of one annual magazine subscription.
With better sales management, more accurate data and a faster turnaround for customers, Newhall Publications is sitting pretty and wondering why other SMEs aren't mobilising their key business processes.
