In many industries, time is of the essence: The faster you can serve a customer, get a part where it’s needed, call the right people to an emergency and so on, the better the outcome. Task management software emerged as a way to alert the right staff members to these pressing needs. But calling the recipient’s attention to a task alert has been a hit or miss proposition — until now.
In a time-pressed, “need it now” world, smartwatches are delivering the breakthrough technology that businesses need to take their responsiveness to the next level. Smartwatches silently, instantly alert the wearer to an urgent task, shaving precious seconds or minutes off the response. It’s no surprise, then, that smartwatch sales are on a sharp upswing, as their ability to enhance productivity and communications comes into clearer focus.
And now, Samsung software called Vantage allows businesses to send and receive any kind of alert to smartwatches and other devices, from any kind of business application.
Vantage collects key analytics, such as when a worker acknowledges and then completes a task, to help businesses measure and improve service levels. Working together, Vantage and wearables bring instant communication, responsiveness and accountability to any time-sensitive business process.
The Advantage of Fast
A speedy response has a measurable effect in any industry. Cutting the elapsed time from when a task first emerges — such as a customer walking in, a part running low, etc. — to initiating a response can make a huge impact. Enabled by the right task management technology, wearables are transforming business across diverse industries. Here are just a few examples:
- Manufacturing: In manufacturing plants and warehouses, managers use wearables and Vantage to signal workers via haptic alerts on their wrists when there is an urgent need for a part or product to maintain uptime or keep shipments moving. This increases asset utilization, prevents delays and enhances productivity.
- Hospitality: Hoteliers are bringing new meaning to attentive service, reducing response time for everything from room maintenance calls to retrieving bags to delivering fresh towels. Staff can communicate discreetly to coordinate services. Meanwhile, restaurants that equip staff with smartwatches can turn tables faster by alerting staff when orders are ready.
- Banking: Several major U.S. banks are using smartwatches for a range of time-sensitive, customer-centric use cases. For example, the system can alert a bank manager to step in when a customer’s need at the ATM can’t be supported by the video teller, such as exceeding the cash limit. Another bank uses the solution to locate an officer when a customer enters one of its multistory, flagship branches for an appointment, thereby expediting service and enhancing satisfaction.
- Healthcare: Few use cases are as urgent as the need to summon doctors to respond to an emergency. Smartwatches and task management put those alerts front and center with silent notifications to trim precious seconds off response time.
- Retail: Smartwatches and task management are helping store managers instantly shift retail associates from operations to customer service tasks in response to demand. Associates can reach out for expert assistance with a touch of the wrist, increasing customer satisfaction and engagement.
Powering Business Processes With Alerts
To do their best work, smartwatches must be connected to a central communication platform. Typically task management tools manage these communications, but most don’t speak the special language of smartwatches, which enables them to parse alerts into the streamlined format that makes for the most effective, succinct messages.
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Samsung Vantage works with Tizen, the open source software platform used for mobile devices, to facilitate this communication. Vantage can stand on its own to send and receive alerts and notifications, managed via a centralized dashboard. It can also be integrated with line-of-business applications, to convert any data field into one that can send and receive notifications. For example, if a field is altered in a customer relationship management application, developers can use Vantage APIs to enable an alert to or from the smartwatches, smartphones, tablets or laptops in use by the sales team.
Vantage also stands apart from typical task management applications through several enterprise-friendly features.
- Enterprise-Grade Security via Samsung Knox: Unlike basic Android, a smartwatch solution using Vantage has Samsung’s highly respected Knox platform built in, enabling solutions to secure data and networks. Businesses can also use it to lock down smartwatches to prevent other uses. Vantage can also enable a smartwatch to be used as a second identifier in two-factor authentication solutions — for example, enabling a bank officer who steps away from a desk to seamlessly but securely log back into their desktop while preventing unauthorized access by others.
- Control: An administrative dashboard enables a global and comprehensive view of the key metrics of every device and user on the platform, to monitor, assign, analyze and escalate tasks.
- Professional Services: Samsung SDS offers an array of professional services to make a smartwatch solution succeed, from a la carte services such as building integrations with APIs, to end-to-end solutions including hosting, kitting, provisioning, deployment and more.
The application also enables location mapping, push-to-talk and one-to-many messaging.
Using Analytics to Measure and Inform Business Practices
If the speed of completing a task is important to a business, then so is measurement. Vantage time-stamps every step: when a message is sent, when the recipient acknowledges it and when a task is completed. That data enables a company to identify areas for improvement — increasing staffing, changing processes and so on — to improve response time, as well as identify best practices that can be shared with other locations.
Samsung SDS America Vantage differentiates from traditional task management applications with its deep, built-in analytics capabilities, which collects this data and provides in-app reporting for real-time visibility into the status of tasks. By leveraging smartwatches and Vantage, businesses can set themselves apart from competitors and win over demanding customers with next-level productivity and responsiveness.
See how wearables are streamlining task management and improving safety for mobile workers in this infographic, or download our free white paper on improving employee wellness with wearables.
