50.4% of Consumers Use Their Smartphones for Business
A research study from Strategy Analytics’ AppOptix practice (AO) found that “50.4% of consumers use their personal smartphones for business purposes,” offering tremendous business opportunities for B2B players. smartphone use
With a growing mobile workforce, employees are using their personal smartphones to conduct business and installing public domain and company-sponsored apps for file sharing, data security, timesheets, expense reporting, and collaboration.
B2B companies have consistently searched for opportunities that target business users with mobile devices, products and services and now based on research from AO that identifies common apps and usage behaviors that companies can use to better identify these business users, often disguised as consumers,. The AO research is based on AO’s AppOptix panel that uses proprietary software to observe behavior combined with a survey of mobile device consumers resulting in over 1,000 respondents combined with its AO panel using proprietary software.
Key findings include:
· 20.5% of business users utilize their personal smartphone over 50% of the time to conduct business
· 20.8% of business users are compensated by their employer for their network/wireless operator charges
· 7.2% of respondents indicated their employer pays for 100% of their operator charges.
Prabhat Agarwal, Director, AppOptix and report author commented, “This research showcases and substantiates there are entry points for B2B players that are looking to offer business services to consumers that increasingly use their go-to personal mobile phone for business affairs. By analyzing combinations of apps, we can create probability profiles that identify likely users of business services.”
Barry Gilbert, Vice President, added, “The business and enterprise user is a critical and lucrative market for mobile operators, device OEMs, and many enterprise software firms. Consumers who use their devices for business do so for a wide variety of applications and present opportunities for mobile operators who may wish to offer value added services and support.”
