Handhelds Untether Sales Staff

Company: UnumProvident

Project Leader: Mike McCleery, Vice President of Technology

Technology In Focus: Hybrid wireless handhelds for e-mail and calendaring

Problem: UnumProvident's mobile sales force lacked efficient tools for checking e-mail and calendars when on the road. They often spent their lunch hours checking e-mail at local Internet cafes, an inefficient way for a multibillion-dollar sales organization to operate.

Solution: The company now uses Treo wireless cell phone/PDAs from Palm. These work in conjunction with integrated wireless services and servers from Good Technologies, as well as data cell phone services from several service providers.Bottom Line: The wireless solution has enhanced efficiencies for sales reps, letting them spend more time out of the office with customers. It has also helped them land contracts by speeding turn-around time with answers to customer queries and issues.

Nothing slams a salesperson's workday more than wasting an hour checking e-mail at an Internet cafe. Nonetheless, that was par for the course before the mobile sales reps at UnumProvident, a major provider of disability insurance in the United States and United Kingdom, began using hybrid wireless cell phone/PDA handheld devices last winter.

The handhelds, from Palm, keep UnumProvident's sales personnel "100 percent connected" while in the field, delivering access to cell phone services, as well as corporate e-mail and calendars--all critical applications in the highly competitive disability insurance industry. These devices work in conjunction with cell phone and wireless data service providers such as Verizon and Cingular and a back-end server from Good Technology.

The deployment hasn't come without its hurdles, however, admits Mike McCleery, the vice president of technology who architected the company's migration to wireless communications capabilities for salespeople and top executives. For one thing, there were only two commercially available options for delivering data and phone services to wireless handheld devices when he first began planning the move two-plus years ago. Hybrid handhelds that adequately combine the capabilities of cell phones and PDAs have only become available within the last year, and even those are relatively immature, says McCleery.The wireless choices available--services and products from Research In Motion (RIM) and Good--offered similar architectural approaches to meeting the challenges road warriors face in terms of access. Only Good, however, offered multiple handheld options and could provision remotely deployed handhelds via wireless cell services.

Since going with Good at UnumProvident's February national sales meeting this year in Atlanta, the system has not only paid for itself, but 98 percent of the company's sales staff say they've become more productive than before, says McCleery. And while the solution may not be perfect, giving each salesperson (and now executives and other key traveling employees) a single handheld device rather than a cell phone and a PDA has greatly eased management of those devices, he adds.

McCleery teamed with UnumProvident's executive vice president of sales, Roger Edgren, to develop the project, and both admit there were growing pains. "But Roger hasn't lynched me yet," jokes McCleery, "so that tells me he's pleased with the results."

COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY

Like many other companies and particularly those selling disability-protection insurance, Chattanooga, TN-based UnumProvident has struggled for profitability during the last few years. The result of a 1999 merger between Unum and Provident Life and Casualty Insurance, it lost $253 million in 2004.The business' answer for generating sales was to get more face time with its major customers--namely, the brokers and consultants who sell UnumProvident's disability and other ancillary insurance offerings to major corporations. This posed a technical problem, however: When on the road, sales reps still retrieved their e-mail by logging in at Internet cafes, taking them away from potential customer meetings. Or they'd end up calling their admins on their cell phones, an altogether inefficient way for a sales organization in a $10 billion company to operate in competitive times.

That sent McCleery looking for ways to deliver wireless access not only to e-mail, but to calendar and task-related information as well. In examining the wireless solutions available then (this was mid-2003), several key issues bubbled to the top of his wish list.

First, he wanted a carrier-agnostic system that would support the wide range of wireless data services available across the country. Second, the solution needed to have a low IT touch point, with low costs to deploy and support. And finally, he insisted on a system that would give him multiple options in handheld devices to buy.

NARROWING IT DOWN

The first issue--support for a wide range of wireless voice and data network services--narrowed the choice down to RIM and Good, according to McCleery. Carrier-specific solutions, such as those from Verizon or AT&T Wireless, lacked the single support solution to meet his requirements.RIM and Good both support multiple wireless services. RIM's models operate over the Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile networks, while Good-supported handhelds run over Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular.

The two vendors provide similar architectural approaches to their systems, both relying on application servers acting as the interface between the wireless infrastructure and the enterprise. These servers give IT personnel the tools to set up and manage user accounts, determine which third-party applications are available to users, and automatically update the handheld firmware via the wireless network.

Where Good's system was stronger was in remote management and choice of handhelds, says McCleery. Good was the only one, for instance, to offer over-the-air provisioning of remote devices. This feature allows UnumProvident IT personnel to set up and manage the handheld devices remotely through the wireless carrier. Now, when the company hires a new salesperson in the company's Glendale, CA, office, the handheld can be bought in California, set up, and ready to use via its wireless connectivity capabilities without UnumProvident's IT personnel ever touching it.

This lowered the Good system's TCO in two ways: first and most importantly, by reducing technical support's need to physically touch the devices during set up and when the handhelds needed updating; and second, by eliminating the shipping costs spent sending the handhelds back to IT when they failed.

Good's support for multiple handheld devices--including those running the Palm, Microsoft Smartphone, and Symbian OSs--was the final straw. "With RIM, we had to buy their device, while Good doesn't care what you use--the Treo or Pocket PC," says McCleery.GETTING STARTED

McCleery opened a pilot program to a small subset of key business leaders in the fourth quarter of 2003, giving Good's G100 data-only wireless PDA to an initial user base of 60 to 70. Within a couple of months, he had nearly 350 salespeople using the device, and by the first quarter of 2004 all of UnumProvident's sales force was using it. In the third quarter, McCleery expanded deployment to other traveling employees as well.

The G100 handheld was an interim device, notes McCleery. At that point, the wireless hybrids on the market weren't stable enough to use, but the company didn't want to wait for the new devices to come out.

After some research, UnumProvident eventually settled on two Palm Treo models, the 600 and 650, as a replacement. The Pocket PC, the other principal choice, offered "inadequate" phone functionality, according to McCleery.

UnumProvident used its February national sales meeting in Atlanta earlier this year as the opportunity to launch the hybrids. The ambitious plan called for replacing about 350 G100s with the Palm Treos in one day."We had some skepticism about our ability to do it overnight," says McCleery. "We built an assembly process, with 17 people working with the carriers to help convert our salespeople's cell phone numbers. That's a challenge because each carrier has a different process."

Provisioning the Treos required UnumProvident to set up network connectivity in the Atlanta hotel, with links back to the corporate network to activate the device and start downloading e-mail and contacts. Only about 5 percent of the new handhelds didn't operate immediately, generally because one of the wireless carriers had failed to transfer the phone number to the device.

McCleery added another 125 users to the wireless hybrid system a month later at UnumProvident's executive leadership meeting. He expanded the devices to the company's other traveling employees shortly afterward, taking the total to about 700.

UnumProvident now operates two GoodLink servers. These servers, which sit behind the corporate firewall, allow UnumProvident's IT department to set wireless device access policies, provide the system's over-the-air provisioning capabilities, and handle integration to back-end applications such as the company's Exchange e-mail system.

EXPECTATIONS METMcCleery and Edgren both say the wireless hybrid rollout more than met their expectations from several perspectives. Edgren points out that the new tools have helped his sales reps make last-minute changes on contract proposals to customers that have cemented sales.

For his part, McCleery believes the system has already paid for itself in reducing sales reps' wasted time accessing e-mail. As proof, he notes that 98 percent of UnumProvident's salespeople indicated in a recent survey that the wireless hybrids have enhanced their productivity. 35 percent say they spend more time in the field talking with customers, and another 29 percent reported that they've reduced their cell phones usage, mostly from not having to call their admins for messages.

Yet even so, there were some significant lessons learned. One of the big eye openers for McCleery and his IT staff was the volume of wireless-related support calls they handled after the deployment. He admits they were unprepared for the heavy load.

He also continues to be somewhat displeased with the performance of the hybrid handheld devices. There's a huge difference from the standpoint of functionality, usability, and performance between what he calls the second-generation hybrids versus mature cell phones, he explains.

Voice quality is a major issue, he notes. For instance, "Some of our people find they need ear buds for quality voice communication, and those can be distracting--they're not something people are used to."Still, these minor issues won't deter McCleery from expanding wireless communications within UnumProvident. The work his staff has done so far has laid the groundwork that will allow UnumProvident's business and application areas to partner.

"We're thinking about CRM and other things that could be determined by end users," he says. "We haven't answered what we can extend to besides e-mail and calendars, but we now have the technology to do so."

Is your enterprise making innovative use of a networking technology or service that you'd like us to write about? Contact Jim Carr, an Aptos, CA-based freelance business and technology writer, at [email protected].