With the acquisition in 2014 of Nokia’s mobile phone business by Microsoft, as well as the emergence of Skype within the enterprise space mobility continues to be at the core of many business’ strategies.

"In fact, the Lync and Skype engineering teams were brought together some time ago, which enables us to further build a first-class communication experience for Skype and Lync users," Microsoft says. "The overall strategy and goal for the future is to continue to introduce new ways for people to connect and to push the field of communications to benefit both consumers and organisations and businesses.”

Meanwhile, analysts have been commenting on the rise and rise of mobile internet for years and shopping on mobile devices drove a hefty proportion of Christmas sales.

The message is clear – we live in a mobile world. And businesses should adapt, or die.

Anytime, anywhere connectivity is driving enormous changes in how we work, play and live. Today we open a pair of blogs considering the impact of mobility on sales, marketing and customer relationship management. This piece will look at how customers are using mobility and how the enterprise needs to react – next time we’ll examine how the enterprise itself needs to go mobile too.

How can your business react to customer mobility?

So, whether your enterprise is consumer-facing or B2B, just how are your customers embracing mobility, and how do you need to react?

Remote working

The proportion of firms with remote workers has increased over the past decade. Internal systems need to work just as well for employees at home, on the road and in alternative offices. For example you need your field sales team to be as mobile and flexible as the people they’re selling to. This means a CRM application such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM that works equally well on tablets and mobile devices as an office computer or laptop.  By making such provisions to your remote workforce, you not only relieve the administrative burden (avoiding double entry once they are back at base) and therefore increase productivity, but you improve employee engagement.

Mobile shopping

If you sell online, you should also be selling on mobile devices. That much seems obvious – most of us know about mobile optimisation of websites and checkout systems. But it goes beyond this, further up and down the sales and marketing chain. What about email marketing, the landing pages they direct potential customers to and the calls to action they invite? Are these optimised for mobile use too?

Social media

When customers can announce praise or dissatisfaction to the world at the touch of a button, anytime, anyplace, it’s absolutely critical that the organisations selling to them are also paying attention anytime, anyplace. We’ve discussed the importance of social listening before– if you’re not building an analysis of social media conversations into your sales and marketing cycle, you’re missing out on huge swathes of vital feedback on your products and services, as well as the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with your customers. Increasing mobility has made social listening a much bigger and more complex task, so it’s vital that your CRM and marketing tools are built with social listening and sentiment analysis at their core, not as an add-on application. You need to be able to embed social media engagement into your sales and marketing practices and ensure that your marketing campaigns both integrate with and respond to conversations happening across multiple social media platforms.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing are designed with modern mobility at their core. They’ll enable your business to not merely respond to the growing mobility of your customers, but to harness it for more sophisticated sales and marketing practices. Customers’ mobility isn’t just a challenge for your enterprise to respond to – it’s a massive marketing opportunity. For more information on the difference Microsoft Dynamics could make to your business and how it can help you to go mobile , contact Prodware today.