Five Ways to Measure ROI for Enterprise Mobility

A good enterprise mobility strategy aims to improve the interaction between people, processes, and products. One of the most attractive aspects of enterprise mobile apps is their ability to drive collaboration and facilitate the sharing of best practices across your internal teams. The separate components of your mobile infrastructure can work together to help you achieve a holistic environment that benefits you, your employees, and your customers.

At this point, few people would argue against the importance of a good mobile strategy—most everyone understands that having a mobile-ready team is indispensable for a modern workforce. However, it’s equally important to measure the overall effectiveness, costs, and returns of the mobility initiatives your business implements.

Why It’s Important

Enterprise mobile apps can offer huge benefits, such as productivity gains, simpler collaboration, and improved sales enablement. But to truly reap these benefits, you’ll need to keep your business goals in mind and on track. This requires constant evaluation, measurement, and—as needed—adjustments.

Determining the real value that mobility brings to your company will help ensure that your strategy remains successful—and that you get the best results.

How to Measure Mobile ROI

In order to calculate the ROI of your mobile apps, you’ll need to use different values to check against the costs and benefits of the strategy. Some of these values are measurable, but some are less concrete in their benefits to your business.

Here are some our favorite methods for determining the effectiveness of your mobile strategy:

Revenue vs. costs: Once you know all the component parts of your enterprise mobility strategy, you can calculate its overall financial benefit. You’ll be able to weigh the qualitative costs against the monetary benefits of the solution, including increased sales, time to market, and profitability.

Usage data: Another aspect of the ROI of your mobility strategy includes the raw data you can capture from it. You’ll be able to learn more about ease of use, effectiveness, average time to complete tasks, time saved or spent, and more.

Productivity: Reducing the need for employees to travel—and cutting back on the time they take to complete tasks—are also distinct ways to increase the ROI of a good mobile strategy. These are sometimes harder to quantify, but no less important to your overall business objectives.

Adoption rate: This is a tricky one. Looking at how quickly and actively your employees adopt the new technologies that you roll out can help you understand the strategy’s effectiveness. Your investment is worth it only if your employees or customers are using the solution. However, some experts argue that using adoption rate to calculate ROI is just a substitute for looking at budgets and the bottom line.

Customer satisfaction: How your customers feel about your company matters just as much as how well your employees do their jobs. A good mobility strategy should improve both factors. Your customers’ overall happiness with your company’s performance is another good indicator of mobility ROI.

As we’ve seen, determining the ROI of your mobile strategy can be a little slippery and depends on a number of factors. But here’s the key: your own definition of success—and of what ROI means—depends on your answer to the question “Why mobile?” When you understand the value mobility can deliver to your business, you’ll have a better idea of which methods will define your ROI.

Assessing or starting your own mobility initiative can be a big job, but you don’t have to go it alone.