The enterprise is ripe for mobile disruption

Business leaders are always looking for ways to leverage technology so that employees can do their best work and meet evolving customer demands. While we settle into the new normal of remote work, mobile technology is taking on a new role in the enterprise, as employees adapt to an increased blending of their professional and personal lives.

At ServiceNow, we recently conducted new research to understand how employees are taking advantage of mobile services offered by their organizations. We looked at gaps between what employees currently do on smartphones and what they want to do. Our goal was to uncover how we can leverage mobile to redefine employee service delivery.

We found that mobile is a burgeoning opportunity for enterprises across industries to boost employee productivity and build better employee experiences.

Basic mobile apps have become ubiquitous in the enterprise
An overwhelming majority of enterprises are already using mobile to support their employees. We found that 90% of organizations use at least one app to increase productivity. Half of the companies in our survey provide productivity, document-sharing, and communication apps.

Now more than ever, employees require flexibility to get work done from anywhere.  However, it has been an uphill battle for enterprises to provide a simple, easy, and intuitive mobile experience that enables efficiency.

Businesses need to offer higher-level tasks on mobile
Currently, many employees use mobile apps to help with basic needs such as accessing the corporate intranet, consuming company news, looking up organizational policies and procedures, or figuring out how to resolve an issue themselves.

However, the mobile experience for complex tasks, like mandatory trainings and submitting expenses, had the lowest satisfaction rates in our survey. Additionally, we found that the user satisfaction rate for such activities is less than 70%.

While it may seem counterintuitive, enabling a one-stop shop for all employee inquiries on mobile devices can also help reduce distractions. By allowing workers to tackle activities like IT help or break-fix requests, or getting answers to HR policy questions, or doing approvals on their smartphones, they can continue with day-to-day responsibilities on their workstation uninterrupted.
 

Enterprise apps should work as well as consumer apps
We also found that current enterprise apps are not living up to high consumer expectations, with 86% of respondents noting a wide variety of frustrations while working on a smart phone, from frequent glitches to unintuitive mobile interfaces. All of this presents a massive opportunity to start making consumer-grade enterprise mobile apps.

At ServiceNow, we believe that organizations should provide their employees with the right digital experiences from anywhere. Mobile apps that provide simple, intuitive, enterprise-grade experiences are crucial to delivering amazing employee experiences.

We are in the early stages of mobile in the enterprise. We see tremendous opportunity to expand mobile capabilities so that employees can access important information and get work done where and how they want. Now that’s a smarter way to workflow.

In coming years, new mobile experiences will greatly improve our efficiency and job satisfaction.  ServiceNow is committed to delivering mobile innovation every step of the way.

ServiceNow conducted this mobile research to examine how individuals at work use mobile. It was conducted from November – December 2019 via a 15-minute online survey. A total of 691 general population full-time employees responded to the survey from the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan. These respondents work for a company with at least 1,001 employees and use a smartphone for work.

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