In the first research of its kind, interviews were carried out with more than 300 mobile professionals across all sizes of business from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy. The research reveals a demand for mobile email among 80% of the respondents, indicating that they expect the flexibility of mobile email to achieve a balance between the demands of a personal and working life. Nearly 70% also recognized that they would be more productive through being increasingly mobile.
“These findings are remarkable,” said Rafal Gajdamowicz, Research Director with RONIN, the international research consultancy. “When ranking their answers in degrees of importance, the greatest number of respondents, over 33% in some instances, scored responses at 10 out of 10. In our experience it is virtually unprecedented for feelings to run so high in a survey of this nature.”
This study was commissioned as a part of Visto’s worklife.freedom initiative, a wider effort by the company to gain a better understanding of mobile workers’ feelings about wireless email services, the features and benefits they expect from such services, and the potential obstacles organizations face when implementing mobile email systems.
“Smarter companies are waking up to the notion that mobile email must address the needs and expectations of all users, not just those of the highest executives,” said Brian Bogosian, Visto’s chairman, president and CEO. “Until now, no one has asked the most important question: what does the other 97% of the professional workforce expect from mobile email? Visto is the only company that has taken the extra step to determine a mobile professional’s requirements and to put into place an organizational-wide initiative designed to address these needs.
This research has identified those factors of greatest importance to the individual user. The following were all rated as important by around 80% of those interviewed:
Ease-of-use
Most important was ease-of-use and the automatic synchronisation of phone and office PC. (84%)
Personal email
An interesting finding was the very high level of importance users placed on having their personal email pushed to their phone, in addition to their work email. (78%)
Scheduled operation
A similarly high response was demand for the ability to control delivery of email without having to disable their phone. (82%)
Contacts and calendar
Respondents wanted to see their contact lists and calendar, in addition to email, being automatically synchronized with their PC. (82%)
“Giving workers access to email services via a mobile device is only part of the story,” commented Jane Vincent, visiting research fellow at the Digital World Research Centre. “To be truly effective, employers also need to be giving them the means to master and manage that access, whether that is by being able to switch between personal and business mail systems, or simply by being able to switch email off, without disabling the phone as well.”
Visto’s worklife.freedom initiative coincides with the rollout of Visto Mobile 5.5, the company’s latest software release designed to address work-life requirements such as multiple independent mailboxes.
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