Beating the traffic

OnMobile provides around 352 million unique users around the world with mobile commerce, advertising and media portal services. Learn how Mail for Exchange helped OnMobile to overcome India’s urban congestion and improve both customer and worker satisfaction.

Founded in California, but now based in Bangalore, OnMobile is India’s largest value-added services (VAS) company, with four offices in three Indian states and around 1,200 employees worldwide. With 352 million unique users (as of March 2010) of its value-added mobile services, the company reported a net revenue of INR 4,544 crore (€744 million) for its fiscal year 2009/10.

OnMobile employees, especially its engineers, spend a lot of time away from the office and on the road. “Our clients are our top priority, so we send our engineers to their offices to work directly with them,” says Hemanth Thorvath, Administration and Facilities Manager at OnMobile. “That means a lot of time out of the office and on the road."

Whenever a customer reports a problem, OnMobile issues a technical support ticket to one of its engineers by email. Customer service level agreements (SLAs) state that each ticket must be addressed and resolved within a set amount of time. Engineers were using GPRS data cards to gain access to office email systems over their laptop computers. This required each field engineer to find a mobile network, power up a laptop, and sign in to the VPN. The process was time consuming, inconvenient and caused costly delays. Quality of data connections was also unreliable, which frequently forced engineers to drive back to the office to access their emails. “People were putting in a lot of extra hours just to access our company networks – and not getting home until late at night,” says Mr Thorvath.

Making a smart switch

At the start of the year, OnMobile began offering its employees Mail for Exchange for all Nokia smartphones. IT managers were sold on the solution, because no third party server was required and they were able to utilise the existing Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. Immediately the response was positive.

Many people already have Nokia smartphones so, without any extra cost, it has been easy for them to set up Mail for Exchange and gain access to the company’s existing Microsoft Exchange email system. An OnMobile IT administrator simply provides each engineer user with the server address and they can complete the set-up on their Nokia smartphone in a matter of minutes.

Within weeks, numerous employees using BlackBerry devices also began to switch to Nokia devices so that they could use Mail for Exchange. This was primarily due to cost savings. The Mail for Exchange charges for each month are substantially less than BlackBerry plans. “There are also many more affordable Nokia smartphones to choose from compared to BlackBerry,” Mr Thorvath says. “People who make the switch also tell us they really like the ease of use and high quality of Nokia smartphones.”

“As a direct result, we have about 400 engineers who are saving around three hours every day,”

Every day, the IT department gets one or two requests to switch to Mail for Exchange. The company expects it will eventually have almost everyone on the solution. “There has been no need to formally train anyone on how to use the software; everyone seems very comfortable with it,” Mr Thorvath says. “Better yet, cases where we would not be able to respond promptly to customer issues have dropped to a fraction of what they were. Our customers are clearly happier with the speed of service.”

Saving time and improving lives

The quality of data connection with Nokia smartphones is so robust that the engineers are able to respond to their emails while in traffic – they don’t need to waste time travelling back to the office just to log on to the office intranet network. The engineers gain hours of productive time each day using Mail for Exchange solution.

OnMobile experienced more than a 20% increase in customer projects completed within the targeted time. Additionally, OnMobile estimates its expenses – particularly travel expenses – have declined by over 30% in the half year since the solution was first rolled out. “People are much happier and I feel we’ve really been able to improve our workers’ lives,” Mr Thorvath says. “I think that’s fantastic.”