IMPROVING customer satisfaction is the key business driver for adopting a mobile strategy to place mobile services at the centre of any CRM strategy – according to research announced today by Siemens. 

A survey conducted through the M-Business Expo website by Siemens canvassed the views of senior IT professionals and business managers. It discovered that keeping customers happy ranked above enabling organisations to become easier to interact with and improving their own competitiveness on their list of priorities. 

The web poll showed that over 70% of respondents believed that connecting employees to office databases, giving centralised access to information, was the best way of achieving and maintaining customer satisfaction making it the best added value of a mobile application. This highlights the need for a consistent, integrated approach to mobile solutions to enable employees to access information from a multitude of sources. 

The survey showed the main organisational benefits desired are improving productivity - with 83% of the vote – and streamlining business processes – 60%. And the importance of RoI was paramount to those who responded. 

Despite the clear benefits the roll out of mobile solutions has been slow, hampered by the difficulty in quantifying the business benefits of adopting mobile data solutions – this is a reflection of the current economic climate. 

Kathryn Howe, marketing manager of Advanced Customer Solutions for Siemens Communications, said: “It’s clear from the research findings that businesses understand how detrimental a potential lack of mobile integration will be to enterprise, and how the customer might ultimately suffer”. 

She added: “Application integration will deliver Rol, and complete the CRM loop. These advantages make it easier to justify, and indeed 60 per cent of those who took part are planning to implement a mobile solution within the next 12 months”.