How The UC Vendors Might Get Beyond "Irrelevance" in Mobile

Any time I hear one of the UC vendors talking about the "importance of mobile," I have to stifle a laugh. Obviously mobile is important, but none of the UC vendors has come up with anything that has any impact on that success. Well, they have delivered one big capability, simultaneous ring, the basic purpose of which is to get the call out of the UC system and onto the user's mobile device - the device they really want to be using! The interest I'm seeing among clients today is in figuring out how many users they can serve exclusively on mobile and save money on UC licenses for desktop devices that are being used less and less.

The UC vendors have faced two major obstacles in delivering a meaningful mobile offering. First, smartphones already do "UC." I can pull up a contact and with a single click set up a voice or video call or send a text or an email. All of that is beautifully integrated with the calendar and other apps on the phone and with Exchange, the whole thing is fully integrated with their desktop and laptop. "Mobile" is not a complement to UC as the UC vendors try to portray it, it's a competitor. And the native smartphone version of UC is winning that battle hands down.

The second obstacle is that the smartphone vendors are running the game, so the UC vendors are forced to deliver a lame "me-too" alternative. While the UC vendors have recently discovered the term "user experience" (UX), but the smartphone guys, Apple in particular, wrote the book on it. Not only have they created this elegant UX that users have become addicted to, they jealously protect it because they know this is one of the most desirable attributes of the product. So outside parties can develop as many apps as they want, but many core functions of the phone like the dialer are not open to developers.

As a result, the UC vendors are forced to develop a separate app that users have to open to get access to the UC way of making calls or sending texts and emails. Of course, unless the company has an SMS gateway, they can only send texts to other UC users from that mobile UC client. Even then, we're talking about SMS, the mobile texting service that is actually shrinking as users have moved to IP texting options. So the only additional feature a mobile UC client provides is presence, but getting that requires accepting a different and for the most part inferior UX.

I have been tracking the user acceptance of mobile UC for the past nine years, and by my count it has still failed to hit five percent of UC users. As near as I can tell the UC vendors don't do any tracking and don't even collect analytics on the few mobile UC clients that are actually being used. Monitoring app and feature use are key to success in mobile apps, so failing to do so is tantamount to saying, "We give up."

Despite this ongoing pattern of failure, the UC vendors have managed to convince the analyst community that their mobile offerings have value. Even Gartner in its most recent Magic Quadrant on UC writes, "In this year's Magic Quadrant evaluation, we again place extra weight on mobility as it remains a key differentiator and requirement. Gartner recommends that enterprises consider adopting a mobility-first strategy, where UC applications are designed first around the mobile UX and then extended for PCs." I agree with the idea of emphasizing the importance of mobility (though that "mobile-first" phrase is so overused it has lost its meaning), but a capability that almost nobody uses adds no value. It's "marketing fluff" pure and simple - don't fall for it.

If the UC vendors are going to add any value they need to do a fundamental restart on their mobile efforts. Here's what they need to do.

• Stop Lying to Yourselves: I had a marketing professor in grad school that told us the worst thing a marketer can ever do is ignore the truth. If you can't admit that you're in trouble, you'll never muster the will to get out of it. If you've got a dog, call it a "dog" and then figure out how to improve its pedigree.
  
  
• Build From Your Strength: There is actually one part of the mobile UC story that has a positive twist: collaboration apps. While nobody "needs" a mobile UC capability beyond what is available in the native smartphone interface, they do need to participate in conferences while on the go. Make that the center of your mobile strategy and build from there.
  
  
• Sell The Hell Out of the Social Collaboration Tools: If the new collaborative work tools like Cisco's Spark and Unify by Circuit get adopted, the mobile capabilities will be needed anytime someone is away from their desk. As email is (unfortunately) our primary collaboration tool today, most of us "live" in Outlook or some other email client. If Spark, Circuit or something similar becomes the focal point of our workday, that will become the app we live in on the desk or in the phone.
  
  
• Get Creative: Virtually all mobile UC apps do the same things and none of them sell - what does that tell you? The only one that stands out from the pack is AVST's ATOM. However, ATOM is more of a personal digital assistant than a "mobile UC" app. You can have it read your appointments, play your voicemails, and follow audio commands to do almost anything you can do with your fingers, so it can allow users to be productive while they're driving - hopefully without jeopardizing safety. Rather than looking at other mobile UC apps for inspiration, try looking at stuff that's actually successful.
  
  
• Build in Analytics: You should know how often the app is opened and for how long. You should know what features are being used and in what order. If certain capabilities aren't being used, you should be asking "Why,?" and if they can't be improved, lose them. We are starting to see the importance of monitoring feature adoption in UC, but we've been doing that forever in mobile apps.
  
  
• Make Mobility Meaningful: People use stuff if it provides value. Does it make them more productive? Is it fun to use? Does it fit into the way they work? To be sure, the smartphone manufacturers have set up obstacles to building truly functional capabilities that could potentially disrupt their beautifully and thoughtfully created UX. You have to give them a reason to open your app and to stay in it. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be in this game. Believe it or not, if you're going to be good at this, you actually have to try.

In UC, mobility has been little more than a parlor trick up until this point. It makes a good demo, but once the UC solution is installed users ignore the mobile capabilities, so it obviously provides no value. The analysts who tout the importance of mobility are absolutely correct, but what we've seen from the UC vendors has been an outright failure. Mobile is hot, but the UC play in it is irrelevant.

This analysis should strike fear in the hearts of UC product planners, because mobile provides an alternative form of UC. Smartphones do "UC;" they just don't bother to call it "UC." And, they do it with a UX that people are absolutely delighted with and that UX just keeps getting better. When I talk to start-ups, the sorts of tools we're touting in the UC community don't even come up. The tools their users want are all defined by their smartphones and if their IP-PBX disappeared tomorrow, they wouldn't even miss it.

It's hard to admit failure, but this admission is long overdue. However, fail to develop a meaningful mobile capability could spell a longer-term failure in UC as a whole. UC offers great capabilities for enterprises to work more efficiently and effectively, but unless they can get the mobile part right, users will find other ways to get the job done.