Do I Need a Portal: Part 3

We’re back with the post you have all been waiting for – part 3 of our blog series about portals and their place in the corporate wireless management space. In part 1, we discussed the importance of ease of use for your end users. Part 2 focused on the importance of having a company that genuinely understood your company’s unique wireless strategy and could customize a software to fit it.

Part 3: Reporting

“Do you have a dashboard? What are you standard reports? How much do you charge for us to add reports to the portal? How long will it take you to create these reports?”

These are all questions we hear quite frequently when we talk with enterprises about our wireless reporting capabilities. If we were to summarize all of the questions we hear into one blanket concern from our prospects, it would sound something like this: Can I count on you guys to create the reports that I need to see and do it in a timely manner?

It’s a very valid question. We hear stories all the time about prospects waiting weeks as their vendors puts their request through a lengthy, formal approval hierarchy prior to them even beginning work on the report. We’ve also heard horror stories from prospects about requesting a new report from the vendor and getting charged thousands of extra dollars for it to be created.

Both of these examples leave the corporate wireless manager in the following scenario: They either receive the report but it cost them $7,000 extra, or they weren’t able to get the report in time so they were left to scramble by themselves in order to please their executive who requested it. And to us, neither of those scenarios sounds ideal.

So when we talk with prospects who are sharing these concerns with us, we came up with (what we believe to be) a pretty simple solution: Find a vendor who dedicates real people to help you at all times and won’t charge you extra for minor customization work.

Sure, the reporting platform within the portal may look nice and sleek during the demo. But reporting involves much more than a few pie charts and basic numbers. It’s about giving an enterprise a true, comprehensive view into their wireless environment while also supplying the information that a company needs to see quickly and effectively.

We’re not saying that the dashboard’s look and feel within the portal isn’t important (because it is). But there are plenty of dashboards available through different outlets. Take a deeper dive into the reporting section to better understand what information will be delivered, when you will get it, and who will be the person responsible for compiling it. Once you know this, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of whether or not a vendor is able to deliver the type of reporting that you need.

Want to know more about how we display reports within our portal? Call 512-615-7600 or email sales@mindwireless.com today to schedule a demo and see it for yourself.