Gone are the days when business mobiles were only used for calls – and the occasional text. With software packages like Microsoft 365, users can have their work emails and documents at their fingertips.
Yet increasingly, modern businesses are developing their own apps to make life easier for their people and their customers. So a good business app can make your people more productive, and your customers more engaged.
What are business mobile phones good for? Absolutely … everything
Sure, some businesses use mobiles for just making calls or texts. Many use it for checking and responding to email and working on documents in the cloud (through Microsoft Office 365, for example). But some industries have found uses (and apps) that have revolutionised the way they do business. Here's just a few examples:
Insurance assessor
Hopefully, it’s been a while since you last had to make a claim on your house insurance. Then, the assessor probably filled in a load of forms and made copious notes about the damage. They would have then written these up back at the office and posted or faxed them to the insurer to process. Nowadays, things are different. Chances are that your insurance assessor will roll up with just a smartphone (and an app).
The assessor will use the voice record function on their smartphone to record their verbal observations of the situation. The dictated report will automatically transcribe into a formatted document, which the insurance company can immediately download.
Theatre, cinema, or gig ticket collector
Buy a ticket and download it online and you can bet that it’ll have a QR code on it. You'll no longer have to hand a printed ticket to a collector, they’ll use their smartphone to scan the code, confirming your entry.
Not only is this more efficient, it also gives the venue a lot more information about you than they would have got with an old ticket stub: they know who you are, your buying history, address, email, IP address, and so on. Before, they just knew how many people had turned up.
Courier
Couriers can use smartphones to receive pick-up or delivery instructions while they’re out on the road, they can use sat-nav apps to get them to the pick-up or delivery point, and then they can get the recipient’s signature on their smartphone screen.
And managers back at base can use the real-time data from their drivers’ mobiles so they know exactly where everybody is.
Openreach engineer
In common with many service businesses, Openreach use smartphones to help gauge customer satisfaction. When the engineer has completed the job, they’ll hand you their smartphone and ask you to complete a short customer satisfaction survey using an app.
Heating engineer
Heating engineers use smartphones to check boiler diagnostic codes and to source and order replacement parts. Next time you call a plumber out, watch how they use their smartphone: depending on their model, they’ll probably use the torch facility to check underfloor piping and the camera to take photos of suspicious pipes that they can’t otherwise get close to.
What’s the difference between a smartphone and a desk phone ?
With BT One Phone the answer’s simple: there isn’t one. BT One Phone is our Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) product and it does away with the fuss of using a phone in the office (with one number) and a mobile when you’re out (with another number). Instead, you use a single mobile.
When you’re in the office the phone uses the standard office network; when you’re out, it works on the mobile network. And it switches seamlessly between the two so you can start a call in the office and carry on talking as you walk out.
Making business mobile pay
Your consumer mobile options are pretty straightforward: contract or PAYG (Pay As You Go). With BT Business mobile you get 3 basic options:
The solo plan
A mobile complete with a monthly package of data, minutes, and texts. It’s ideal for businesses with just a few mobile users.
SIM-only
You pay for the SIM card and its accompanying monthly package of data, minutes, and text, but you provide your own mobile device.
Mobile Sharer
With other mobile plans you pay a fixed monthly charge for a package of data, minutes, and texts. Now, you might be lucky and always use all of those allowances each month but it’s more likely that you don’t quite manage it. You could have some minutes left that you’ve paid for, but you’ll never use.
Across a company with multiple mobile users these scraps of unused allowances soon mount up. As a business, you could be paying significant sums for allowances that you just throw away.
Not with Mobile Sharer. Mobile Sharer lets you share the allowances across a pre-defined group of employees. So, for example, if you know that Saul uses more minutes than Carrie every month but that she’s a heavy data user, you can share their allowances appropriately. That way, you’ll be using your overall company allowances much more efficiently.
Take a look at our mobile pages for more information about our handsets, our tariffs, and Mobile Sharer.
Does your business use mobile phones? Let us know how you find them in the comments.
@Jen1
