Enterprises increasingly use mobile platform for internal, external communication

Businesses increasingly are using wireless technology to communicate internally among employees and externally with potential and existing customers. The trend is only going to continue as more people drop landline telephone services. While traditional media companies were early adopters of mobile technology to communicate, healthcare, automotive, retailers and financial services are rapidly adopting mobile platforms.
One company SFN Group Inc. (SFN) is using mobile technology to communicate with job seekers and employees. SFN is a professional services and general staffing company that employs more than 170,000 people a year and is one of North America’s largest employers. The company is has adopted an integrated mobile strategy that includes mobile-optimized websites, text alerts and mobile job centers, among other things, to increase its interaction with employees and its 560 local offices. “We have a lot of people we have to communicate with,” said Lisa McCarthy, director of PR and marketing at SFN.
The 65-year-old company “has always been at the forefront of innovation. Our web site is in the Smithsonian,” McCarthy said. “We started with texting job alerts because we would get more timely responses. People don’t answer their voice mail.” While an email about a job alert may take people days to respond to the company, McCarthy said potential job candidates respond to a text message within four to five minutes.
Both its professional and administrative employees prefer to communicate through mobile, McCarthy said. Executives are busy and on their smartphones and administrative employees might not have landline service.
SFN also found that people who completed a job rarely fill out SFN surveys. Using mobile, the response rates to the surveys have improved. Building on that success, the company started to use mobile to communicate internally as well, said Vinnie Fiordelisi, CMO of 3C Interactive, which provides the messaging component to large enterprises, including SFN and Walgreens. “It’s more cost effective and helps to place people faster.”
Text messages can be used to communicate with job candidates, remind them of appointment times and job openings, he said.
Other businesses are also adopting mobile platforms to communicate with customers.
Walgreens, for example, not only calls and sends emails to customers telling them their prescription is ready, it now also sends text messages and has a mobile application. Prescriptions that are not picked up are a big problem for Walgreens, so the company is searching for ways to interact quickly with the consumer, Fiordelisi said.
“Our business is not always doing the sexy, creative, innovative. It’s really taking an existing process and moving it to the mobile channel,” Fiordelisi said.