5 Questions to Ask Your Enterprise Mobility Solutions Provider
A whole world of opportunities awaits the IT enterprises that embrace cutting-edge mobility solutions – higher productivity, greater employee satisfaction, quicker turnaround times, and more. Quite naturally, businesses are increasingly adopting mobility solutions and thus this trend has spawned many Managed Mobility Service (MMS) providers. The task today is to choose the right MMS partner, who can walk toe-to-toe with you. To simplify this task, here are some questions that you should ask your potential providers. Their answers will help your organization make the right decision.
How will you help me save time?
The IT department is already stretched thin, thanks to the growing trend of virtualization, explosion in the number of security risks, and a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Although mobility offers great benefits to organizations, the already overloaded IT departments are in no position to allocate dedicated resources to procuring, managing, and supporting a vast array of mobile devices with varying configurations. Bringing a mobility services provider should solve this problem.
A reliable mobility services provider saves IT departments their precious time and resources. IT departments can offload non-critical, mundane tasks like mobility management to a dedicated partner. This frees up highly skilled staff that can now be assigned to more mission-critical tasks that either improve the organization’s processes or add competitive advantage to the business. Both are crucial for a sustainable growth in revenue.
So, ask your mobility services provider how much responsibility they are willing to shoulder and how many of your resources will that release?
Who are your MDM partners?
The best companies in any business have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. They focus their energy on the core areas of their business and outsource or offload other aspects of their businesses to third parties who are the best at what they do. This rule applies to mobility services providers too. Just because they are operating in the IT industry, they are not automatically a software company. If a mobility services provider has any such delusions, it is best to stay away from them.
The best mobility services providers have a carefully chosen network of mobile device management (MDM) partners, from whom they source their mobility solutions. They test these products themselves and understand the integrity, reliability, and effectiveness of those solutions. When you ask your mobility services provider about their MDM partners, they should give you a list of their most trusted partners. Some of the best MMS solutions providers on the market partner with MaaS360, SOTI, and AirWatch and pass on the savings to their clients. If the list includes names like these, then it means that you are in good hands. Your MMS partner is doing business with other reliable businesses. You can also safely infer that they have a clear vision and understanding of their limits.
What level of support will you offer my organization?
Responsive and reliable customer support is the most critical element of any IT solution or service. Different mobility solutions providers offer a varying degree of support to their customers. However, some aspects of support in the mobility industry are quite standard. For instance, end-user support and internal support are non-negotiable. No matter how tech savvy your staff or your end customers are, they are not the experts in the mobility systems that your organization is using. There is no telling when your mobility platform will face technical problems. Thus, quick and dependable support should be available at any time of the day, or night for that matter. Especially, if you have international operations, then you may need support during odd hours, throughout the day. More to the international point, be sure that your provider understands international travel as it relates to plans and as a whole. Your mobility services provider should be able to offer support as you need it, and when you need it.
Then there is the matter of setting up the mobility platform and then managing it. Some top mobility services providers would be happy to take care of the entire process from procuring to provisioning – cradle to grave. . They can even take care of troubleshooting, and round-the-clock maintenance. Just be sure to decide what level of control and responsibility you wish to entrust the mobility services provider with and draw very clear lines.
How long will it take to implement?
Choosing a mobility services provider is the hardest part. Bringing them onboard is a cakewalk. There is no software to install or host on the web. The service provider takes care of all the digital infrastructure involved in setting up an enterprise-wide mobility portal on their back end. On the front end, your organization’s mobility services should be up and running in a matter of a minutes. Perhaps, a couple of hours at the most.
What about the costs and savings?
In addition to mobility and better security of corporate data, an MMS provider should offer two crucial benefits to your organization – time and cost savings. Incidentally, the two are interconnected.
After conducting an initial audit of your company’s mobile spend and identifying cost savings, your MMS provider should take the responsibility for realizing these savings from your very next wireless bill and continue throughout your partnership.
The additional time savings from not having have to manage your end users or internal mobility management task can all be converted into dollars and will amount to a very substantial sum even for an average company. Moreover, any competent MMS provider should be able to easily recover their fees from the savings that they generate for your organization, thus providing a no-net cost solution without switching your wireless carriers or spending additional company money.
Final Thoughts
A competent mobility services provider would be happy to answer all your questions and be as specific as they can, in order to ensure that no misunderstandings arise in the future. Moreover, the more details and specifics you share with them, the better customizations they can offer your organization in terms of their services.