InetSoft Webinar: Metrics on Customer Satisfaction

This is a continuation of the transcipt of a webinar hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and he discusses the topic “The Advantages of Mobile Business Intelligence".

Mark Flaherty: Now we found at that time that while executive management is still the most common user of Mobile BI, there were significant roles, specific activity in areas such as outside sales which was used by 47% of organizations, IT and also operations and field service. That is up from about one-third of organizations back in our survey from November and December saying 'we are currently using mobile BI,' with 10% planning to adopt it within this year and 25% planning in the next year and beyond.

I spoke to a customer, and this gentleman was the sales manager for a vendor of software as a service customer relationship management of CRM products. And he told me, “When I am on the road, the last thing I do before I walk into a customer’s office is just to take a minute or two, to look up the history with our products and see if they have any major trouble tickets or if there are any trouble tickets outstanding, if there are any issues on invoices are getting payments and so on”. And so it's really just a great way for those people to be able to get that information at the last minute and get back current status before they go into those meetings.

Likewise, in areas such as the retail vertical, it's possible then for area managers to access sales information for the store they are visiting. And some are starting to use a location intelligence built into mobile devices to automatically apply filters to the data. So they are using the location awareness built into the device to only pull up the data that is relevant for the user depending on which job they are in at the time.

So I will just help you to figure out how you can make the case for using Mobile BI in your organizations. We are into the ability to find relevant information using Mobile Business Intelligence. And this is really quite a broad metric obviously, it cuts across all application areas and it's a very simple measure. You know the Mobile BI implementation is set up so the users can find the information they need when away from their desk or it's not.

The second metric on customer satisfaction comes from businesses in all kinds of industries that have noted that their customers are becoming more and more demanding. And so we have included customer satisfaction here for that reason. I think one of the areas is that is related to that increasingly demanding customers, is that their demand for timing and accurate information. So as discussed earlier, one of the potential benefits of Mobile BI is to allow employees on the move to get updates into that information anytime and anywhere. And so we expect to see this timely information reports through to providing customers with that information too. And so we included customer satisfaction for that reason. Employees can find the information they want, when they need to through Mobile BI. Mobile business intelligence increases BI usage in general, as more people will use it every day within their work processes.

Think about BI really as having three broad buckets or three broad elements, we talk about Data Collection, we talk about Data Assembly, and also Data Presentation. So why is this important? Well I think while all the excitement in Mobile BIs has been around really sexy new devices with very elegant presentation and user interfaces, some things really never change, and so it's a fundamental principal of BI or even IT in general actually that if you put garbage in you will get garbage out.

View live interactive examples in InetSoft's dashboard and visualization gallery.

And so remember by definition, employees at the best performing organizations are more likely to find the information they need using mobile devices than other survey respondents. So what this chart tells us - and it's not just about the device you have or the quality of the charts and dashboards that you use for Mobile BI - top performers have put in place a very solid foundation of data that they are able to leverage into that Mobile BI deployment. So how does this play out in practice? Well you see twice as many organizations having a 360 degree view of the customer available for their employees to access, compared to all other organizations.