Betting On Mobile Coverage: What Is The True Ante For An Online Application

By Damien Moriarty, Retriever Communications

Market maturity in field mobility applications has continued to improve in recent years and as such, these initiatives become more central to organizations’ strategy and differentiation. As a result, project steering committees are made up of a wider group of people from the organization, which unfortunately dilutes the focus on the challenges faced by remote fieldworkers. One example of this are projects where the ability to work out of mobile coverage is removed with reckless abandon. After all, offline capabilities are hard to implement and mobile coverage is effectively everywhere, isn’t it?

The answer is yes, while you are in the office. But out on the road, we have all experienced the situation where we struggle to get one lonely bar to appear on our mobile while someone with us has full coverage with another provider. This is where the mismatch in expectations arise. People from head office involved in the project may at best do a couple of site visits at convenient locations (i.e. close to head office) where mobile coverage is effective. This then drives the assumption that coverage is good at all sites. The reality is, coverage varies widely due to a range of circumstances and can’t be relied on across all sites.

Remember, these applications are not opportunistic, they are a key tool for a fieldworker to do their job.  There is usually a high degree of frustration that erupts throughout the office when an ERP or CRM system is down for any length of time during work hours. If your application is truly useful, you can expect a similar reaction from your fieldworker. Even if they don’t voice it, they will start changing their working habits to reduce the impact this has on them.