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Well-Connected Road Warrior

Dean is a technical sales executive. His job involves being on the road and at clients' sites much of the time, and requires him to keep up to date with the latest developments in IT. He also needs to maintain regular contact with his support team back at the office, and have a range of information at his fingertips. Every client is different, and there is no set formula for what sort of information he will need to access.

Dean's routine duties include a lot of stamp-collecting activities. Whenever Dean does stamp-collecting work, we'll highlight it with this little icon .

Dean has travelled to a client's site the previous night, and booked into a hotel. He knows the area well enough to find his favourite hotel, and has booked the appointment online a couple of weeks ahead. That evening, he looks up a local directory (whether paper or electronic, its still stamp-collecting! ) to find a place to eat. Afterwards, he connects back to the office CRM system to review past relationship with this client . He sees that they use FudgeServer (tm) alongside his own company's products, so he looks up FudgeSoft on a general-purpose search engine or a specialist IT site to get some recent reviews of their products. He may send some questions back to the technical support team via email or instant messenger .

Keeping in contact is vital for Dean. He communicates using email, IM, phone, video-conferencing - on his laptop, his PDA or smartphone, and sometimes its nice to have a web-mail interface as backup. It's important that these systems' address books keep in sync with one another in a way that doesn't interfere with his ability to do business.

Dean receives a lot of messages every day, from clients, from his support team and other colleagues, from salespeople, from spammers. He tracks a few technical mailing lists and bulletin boards too. It can take up to 3 hours a day to wade through this stuff, even though the job is made much easier for his email by the use of intelligent filtering technologies that do some of the stamp-collecting work for him. He'd love to be able tofilter some of the bulletin board messages the same way, but as they're restricted to a web front-end, he does that by hand , and perhaps less frequently than he'd like.

Dean uses his computing resources as a means to communicate. He needs to be focused on the customer in order to do his job well. The technical aspects of communication ought to be effortless, and consistent across a range of platforms. For sure, a PDA or smartphone can't offer such a rich user interface as a laptop or desktop because of size constraints, but everything ought to be organised using the same logic and offer the same facilities. Further, the interfaces that he uses need to be flexible, allowing him to interact with the data as a problem-solver rather than follow a set task-based script.

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