Smartphones

[AskSYB]

I’m often out of the office, but I still want to be able to access information about my customers when I’m away from my PC. Can a smartphone help?

[sybadmin]

In issue 43 of SYB magazine Rory O'Neill, Senior Director of Research in Motion replies:

Absolutely. According to a recent study from Forrester Consulting, over 50% of organisations in the UK said they had lost a sales opportunity or were unable to service a customer request while they were travelling because the information they needed was back at the office. By having the right applications on your smartphone, or mobilising existing customer relationship management systems, you can meet customer expectations with speedy response time, and have access to the most up to date and accurate information available to serve and sell to customers. In fact, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications (such as Salesforce.com, Sage CRM or Maximiser) were named one of the five most beneficial mobile applications in a study of small businesses in the UK by YouGov (2009). The survey identified the other popular mobile applications as instant messaging, banking facilities, conference calling and SatNav. 
Using applications on a BlackBerry smartphone can improve productivity of mobile workers and, as a result, positively impact customer experience and satisfaction.

A number of CRM, productivity and management tools can now be directly downloaded from application stores like BlackBerry App World, which BlackBerry smartphone customers can download for free from.