When you think of employees and mobile devices, the image that probably comes to mind is of an office worker making and receiving phone calls. In other words, you think of basic, boring mobile features and use cases.

For ordinary, off-the-shelf mobile devices, this image is fair. Employees with off-the-shelf mobile hardware don’t often use these devices for more than standard features like calling.

But when you empower employees with custom mobile devices or custom mobile operating systems, you open up a whole new range of possibilities. With custom hardware or software, a much broader set of workers can leverage mobile devices to make their jobs more efficient, improve data accuracy, protect sensitive information, and more.

To prove the point, here’s a look at six examples of workers who can benefit from custom mobile devices or operating systems.

Healthcare Professionals

Collecting healthcare data from patients can be a time-consuming and stressful affair for providers and patients alike. When done manually, it requires patients to visit medical offices, where providers can collect data like blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature.

Providers could, of course, ask patients to collect and report this data themselves, but doing so poses several challenges, such as the possibility of inaccurate data reporting and security issues associated with having patients collect and manage this data themselves.

Custom mobile devices that operate as remote patient monitors or interactive hubs that collect data from specialized accessories offer a more efficient – and more secure – solution. By designing a custom device that has the hardware and software features necessary to collect whichever patient data the provider needs and transfer it directly to the medical office, remote patient monitors offer a solution that is better for all stakeholders.

Front-Desk Staff

Having to wait a long time to check in can significantly impact customers’ overall experience. In the hotel industry, for example, guest satisfaction among customers in the United States decreases by 47 percent if guests wait more than five minutes to check in.

It’s not just in hotels that long waits to check in can be problematic for customer experience. Any business that relies on front-desk staff to greet and check in customers – from airlines to doctor’s offices to restaurants – can suffer when its staff becomes too overwhelmed to handle a large influx of customers.

Self check-in kiosks powered by custom mobile devices offer an efficient solution to this challenge. Kiosks are a cost-effective and scalable way to increase the volume of customers that front desks can handle. As a bonus, they can add security and privacy to the check-in process by avoiding situations where customers have to share personal information orally with check-in staff in a space where others can overhear.

Warehouse Staff

Keeping track of warehouse inventory that is constantly moving is challenging under any circumstance. It’s especially difficult if employees have to enter inventory data into non-mobile workstations or (worse) write it down with pencil and paper. And although scanning guns that can read barcodes to help check items into and out of warehouses help, they don’t provide the full range of features or interfaces necessary to work in-depth with inventory data.

On this front, custom mobile devices offer a solution by providing warehouse staff with devices that can not only scan items but also provide a complete user interface for reading and modifying inventory information. In other words, custom mobile devices for warehouse workers combine the mobility of mobile scanners with the rich features of workstations, allowing staff to manage inventory more accurately and efficiently.

Field Service Technicians

Technicians tasked with maintaining equipment in the field have a difficult job. In addition to responding to calls for maintenance or service at remote sites, they must also serve as record-keepers by tracking information about each job. Sometimes, they have to handle payments as well.

Custom mobile devices can help field service technicians streamline these ancillary tasks by automatically recording data about each service call, such as the location of the work and conditions about the site. At the same time, custom devices can be designed to serve as mobile Point of Sale (POS) systems, allowing technicians to accept payments and generate receipts without handling messy paperwork or calling in payment information to a central office.

In these ways, custom mobile devices can help service techs focus on their core responsibility – performing service – while purpose-built mobile hardware and software handle other tasks.

Transportation Workers

Logging vehicle travel is a core task for many transportation workers. But the conventional approach – handwritten logs – is inefficient for workers and unreliable for businesses, since it is difficult to guarantee the accuracy of logs that are recorded manually. GPS devices that automatically record vehicle movement may help, but they don’t always provide the extra features – like the ability to record the purpose of a trip – that businesses need to generate fully contextualized transportation logs.

With custom mobile hardware, however, it’s possible to both log travel automatically and allow employees to enter any additional information the business may require. For transportation workers and business stakeholders alike, custom mobile devices offer a more efficient and reliable solution to electronic logging.

Nonprofit Workers and Volunteers

Nonprofits tend to have limited staff. The last thing they want is for employees or volunteers to waste time on tasks like manually collecting donations instead of providing core services.

By leveraging custom mobile hardware to automate tasks like the collection of donations, scanning donated goods etc., nonprofits can make the most of the workers they have at their disposal. In this way, custom devices make it easier for nonprofits to hold large-scale events with limited personnel.

Conclusion: Leveraging Mobile Hardware Across the Business

Typically, consumer-grade mobile devices offer limited hardware and software features that can benefit only office employees. But when businesses design custom mobile devices or operating systems that are tailored to their unique needs, they can leverage those devices to improve the efficiency of a much broader spectrum of their workforce.