Business Agility: Strategies for Gaining Competitive Advantage through Mobile Business Solutions

the phone versus over the Web, with telephone call center agents

unable to provide the $100 cheaper tickets that are quoted on a Web

site that will not complete the final booking.

Simply stated, M-Business will challenge customer relationship

management systems. They will have to not only adapt the presenta-

tion layer to present content in the appropriate manner for a variety

of devices, but these systems will also have to become more intelligent.

They will have to know exactly what information to collect from the

customer and understand all the permutations about the information

and transactional requests being conducted. There is still a tremen-

dous way to go here. Even Web applications have a long way to go.

To give an example, how many airline Web applications can allow

you to book travel that is made up of part frequent flyer mileage and

part paid travel? These simple scenarios often mean the customer is

forced to resort to regular telephone calls with an agent or agents.

Providing Intelligent Customer Service

Despite the challenges of adding further intelligence into customer

relationship management applications, especially those enabled via

M-Business, the opportunities for increased customer satisfaction,

increased revenues, and reduced costs are tremendous.

M-Business technologies provide a way for the enterprise to take

a more proactive stance regarding the customer relationships. Instead

of waiting for a call to customer sales or service and telling the cus-

tomer what they cannot do, the enterprise can now contact the cus-

tomer and tell them what they can do. M-Business-enabled CRM is all

about becoming more pro-active in your communications with your

customers and often turning customer service and support interac-

tions into new ways to deepen the customer relationship. Moreover, it

allows one to find new sales opportunities via personalized, time, and

location-aware interactions.

Intelligent M-Business devices may well be able to communicate

not only with the customer, but with his or her surroundings and his

or her surrounding products. Thus, an intelligent device with a soft-

ware agent running on behalf of a manufacturing company could

detect the devices within the personal area network of the customer,

perform a health-check on the devices, and contact customer support

if anything is detected to be out of the specified tolerance limits. This

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