Had I asked 100 people five years ago if they or
anyone they knew had a PDA, I probably would have
gotten 99 blank looks. "PDA? What's that? The
Preventive Dentistry Association? Public Defenders of
America?"
Yet, 1996 is the year that the very first personal
data assistant, the Palm Pilot 1000, was introduced.
Although at the time it was heralded as an amazing
device, in retrospect, its slow processing power and
128 KB of memory seem almost laughable pitted against
the truly amazing devices available today. Personal
data assistants are the wave of the computing future,
essentially acting as a bridge between the desktop PC
and the user's life and business; and, in some cases,
replacing some of the functions that formerly could
only happen on a PC. Make no mistake: we are in the
middle of a computing revolution, and it's literally
happening in the palms of our hands.
A Bit Of History
First, here is a bit of basic information for readers
who may not be familiar with the handheld computing
world. PDAs come in two flavors, or operating systems.
Your first choice is the Palm OS, invented and used by
Palm, Inc. and also by the company Handspring, which
was founded by two of the original creators of the
Palm OS. Both Palm and Handspring build their products
around this model, and devices that use this operating
system are famous for being light, compact,
easy-to-use and long on battery life. Inputting
information is accomplished through a method called "Graffiti,"
which enables a user to write characters on the input
pad with a stylus. A minor amount of self-training is
required to learn the slightly modified Graffiti
alphabet, as several characters, notably k, q and x,
must be input with a single stroke of the stylus,
without removing the stylus from the input screen.
Some characters are tricky; I often had problems with
the letter "v" being recognized as "u," until I
learned that drawing "v" from right to left solved
this common problem.
The other player in the handheld computing field is
the Pocket PC operating system, invented by Microsoft
and used in models manufactured by Compaq, Casio and
Hewlett-Packard, among others. The Pocket PC-based
handhelds are best known for being fast and having a
great deal of both internal and expandable memory as
well as terrific graphics. For input, the Pocket
PC-based PDAs use a method called "Character
Recognizer," which is similar to Graffiti but, in my
estimation, about 10 percent more difficult to master.
So, What Do I Use It For?
In their earliest models, PDAs were little more than
electronic calendars and address books that possessed
the ability to create short notes, but no actual word
processing documents. Today's newest, sleekest models,
notably the Palm M505 and the Compaq iPaq 3650, allow
users to surf the Web, send and receive e-mail, create
and spell-check word documents (the iPaq comes
standard with a mini or "pocket" version of MS Word),
play MP3 files, take digital photos (with appropriate
hardware additions), play complex games and even
connect and run remote server-based applications that
don't reside on the PDA via programs from companies
like Citrix, in the case of Pocket PC-based units.
Wireless CRM, Of Course!
It doesn't take a stretch of the mind to imagine the
wondrous things that could be accomplished in the name
of customer service with the help of PDAs. We all know
that skills-based routing is an integral part of
providing the best service to your customers. But the
right expert may not always be at his or her desk,
quietly working at a PC. The desired expert might be a
technician on the road, a multilingual agent "on call"
but attending a Little League game, a company
executive on vacation or a contact center manager in a
classroom conducting a training session. What would it
be worth in the world of customer service to be able
to reach the right person to handle a customer contact
at all times, not only by voice but on the company's
computing platform?
Some companies have recognized the inherent
potential of wireless CRM and have begun developing
software that ties the handheld platform to a company's
customer service functions. One such player is Shared
Resource Management, which late last year
introduced its allegro anywhere product that uses the
Pocket PC technology to enable delivery of all
customer service functions onto a user's handheld.
Questra is
another company that has begun treading the path to
wireless CRM by partnering with Intel, Siebel and Palm
to produce a suite of products designed to link
enterprise applications with remote devices using the
Palm OS.
Sales Force Automation
This is another area with huge potential for handheld
computing. Today, most sales people who spend a great
deal of time on the road have cell phones, but must
wait until they check into a hotel to dial up on their
laptops and have access to e-mail, the Internet and
company contact management software or databases. In
order to check a name or telephone number in the
company contact management software, road-warrior
sales people must rely on office-based coworkers to
farm through the database or Web surf for them and
relay details awkwardly over the telephone.
Imagine the value of being able to use a handheld
device to send and receive e-mail from the user's PC
desktop (as opposed to a special palm.net account),
check a contact database for customer history
information, instantly perform stock and price checks
and quickly access the company's official RFP (request
for proposal) templates?
To meet the demands of wireless sales force
automation, Invensys
CRM earlier this year released a product called
eConfiguration. The software is designed to allow
mobile sales professionals to create error-proof sales
proposals on the spot on their Pocket PC devices, with
all data based on enterprise information and delivered
via the device's Internet connection. The resulting
sales proposal can be created quickly and easily,
without the possibility of miscommunication, reliance
on old data or plain, old-fashioned goof-ups.
Additionally, if a customer requests a reconfiguration
of a proposal, it can be done automatically and in
real-time.
One example of a similar application developed on
the competing Palm OS was wrought by an agreement
between Nortel Networks and Accenture (formerly
Andersen Consulting) and was released late last year.
The new solution is a wireless extension of Nortel's
eFront Office CRM suite.
Just as a final bonus for mobile professionals who
must navigate to appointments, imagine having GPS
(global positioning satellite) capabilities on your
handheld, combined with a service such as Mapquest,
enabling you to have all the benefits of a telematics
service such as OnStar, but for a fraction of the
cost. Traffic reports delivered via wireless could let
you know that there is an accident or a lane closed
twenty miles ahead on your present route, and the
traffic service could then suggest an alternate route,
helping you get to your next appointment on time.
Vertical Market Applications
There are too many vertical markets that would benefit
from the use of wireless CRM delivered to PDA
platforms to count, but I can mention just a few of
them here.
The travel industry. Imagine if the
travel industry could offer to its best customers the
ability to change travel plans on the fly: to browse a
Web site and change a flight time, request a special
in-flight meal after perusing the choices, make a
rental car reservation or even just confirm a flight
via his or her handheld computer. At this point, there
is nothing to stop airlines from being able to issue
boarding passes directly to a handheld computer,
allowing the traveler to beam his or her boarding pass
to a device at the airport gate.
Appliance or utilities service and
maintenance. Providing PDAs to service
personnel who make home-based visits to service
appliances or for utility companies, thus allowing
them to then order necessary parts, look up technical
information or make notations to a customer's file,
could save a phenomenal amount of time and money for
an organization and help eliminate errors and delays.
Warehouse or store inventory management.
If you have ever witnessed how painstaking the
inventory process can be you can imagine in a
heartbeat the benefits of being able to remotely
provide a central database with inventory data to help
speed the process.
Healthcare. Doctors, nurses and other
healthcare personnel were the first people to
universally carry pagers, so it's no surprise that
this segment may be the first to universally carry
handheld computers. In addition to using the device to
stay in touch with an office for messages and
emergency alerts, healthcare professionals can use
them to make notations to patients' charts remotely,
send prescriptions to pharmacies, look up a drug's
side effects and potentially dangerous interactions on
the Web, keep in touch with a patient's insurance
company's policies and most importantly, schedule tee
times.
Banking. Yes, most banks today have a
Web site on which customers can do online banking, and
all have toll-free numbers customers can use to
interact with an IVR and receive account balances,
monitor checks cleared, etc. Imagine the convenience
for a bank customer to use his or her PDA to view all
aspects of his banking, from account balances, IRAs
and check status to mortgages and loans, all in a
custom-designed Web page, delivered to a PDA.
Stock trading. While a WAP-enabled
phone can deliver stock prices and changes, the
broader memory, functionality and better graphics of a
PDA could deliver predictions, analyst reports, graphs
and news reports about a particular company in a much
more complete way than a WAP-enabled cellular phone
ever could.
Real estate. Imagine how much easier
it would be to maintain real estate databases and
current financing info if an estate agent could carry
a wireless enabled PDA? Appliances that turn handheld
computers into digital cameras (such as Handspring's
EyeModule2) could allow an agent to take a photo of a
house newly put up for sale, and the agent could than
post the photo, along with a write-up and pricing
information, to the real estate company's main
database instantly, allowing other agents access to
selling information on the house from the road,
eliminating the need to return to the office. Along
the same vein, real estate agents might benefit from
some of the new Internet-ready digital cameras, such
as Ricoh's
RDC-i700, which gives users the ability to send
and receive images via e-mail, and to browse the
Internet. With such technologies, an agent meeting
with potential buyers could call up mortgage rates
from competing companies for the benefit of the
buyers, retrieve insurance quotes, town statistics and
tax information, historical details about the house,
etc.
Location-Based Targeted Marketing
Let me say from the get-go that this technology, which
enables a marketer to determine when a customer is in
a specific geographic location and send a promotion to
his or her Web-enabled PDA or WAP-enabled mobile
phone, should be conducted only on an opt-in basis,
and not sent to customers who don't wish to receive
such messages. But imagine that you operate a chain of
successful coffee shops. Your loyal followers, who
prefer your double-mocha half-caf latte to anyone else's,
could opt in to your wireless, location-based
marketing program, and voila, each time they're in a
new city they can receive a message from you that lets
them know you have a shop nearby and that, if they buy
a cup of coffee today, they get a free almond
biscotti. You could even let your coffee-hungry
customers "download" an e-coupon to their PDAs, and
then give them the ability to beam the coupon directly
to your cash register via their handhelds' infrared
synching capabilities.
Room To Grow
The PDA market is certainly nowhere near its maturity.
Data transfer rates are still quite slow, and PDAs
that can connect to the Internet or be used in the
manner of a cell phone of course require a cellular
carrier (and be subject to the frustrations of the
U.S. cellular industry with its self-defeating
competing standards) and Internet service provider.
Should you move to an area that is not serviced by
your chosen providers, you will experience all the
inefficiencies of regional cellular restrictions and
ISPs.
But in the near future, battery life will continue
to improve, a wider variety of accessories will sprout
up and, in a few years, even today's most advanced
devices will seem primitive in terms of memory,
processing speed and applications. There is still an
issue of security, as well. If you hand your remote
sales person or remote customer service agent a PDA
that contains sensitive customer or company
information, a unit left on an airplane or in a
restaurant could conceivably be misused by the finder.
Earlier this year we learned about the potential
for the Bluetooth Wireless standard in PDAs. Bluetooth
will improve on the traditional infrared transmission
standard in most existing PDAs as, unlike with
infrared, Bluetooth transmission can happen between
two handhelds around corners, through walls and from a
greater distance. A Bluetooth-enabled PDA would no
longer require plugging into a synching cradle via a
USB port to share data between the unit and the
desktop PC.
Finally, cellular phone manufacturers have been
teaming up with the dual PDA platforms to design PDA
cell phones, or "smart phones," which are predicted to
eventually eliminate the need to carry around both a
cell phone and a handheld computer. These devices,
still in their prototype phase in the U.S., are
currently expensive and a bit too bulky for most
consumers' tastes, but as the combined technology
expands, the units will become increasingly practical
and affordable.
An Industry To Watch
This magazine has, for twenty years, been dedicated to
bringing our readers the latest and most useful
information on delivering the very best of customer
service. We are excited about the burgeoning personal
data assistant market and its applications to wireless
CRM, and plan to keep our eyes and ears open for the
kind of news and information that can help you run the
very best contact center possible. I invite you to
share your stories of how you are using or intend to
use wireless CRM in your customer service operation.
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher
Group Editor-In-Chief
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