In many industries, time is of the essence: The faster you can serve a customer, get a part where it’s needed, call the right people to an emergency and so on, the better the outcome. Task management software emerged as a way to alert the right staff members to these pressing needs. But calling the recipient’s attention to a task alert has been a hit or miss proposition — until now.

In a time-pressed, “need it now” world, smartwatches are delivering the breakthrough technology that businesses need to take their responsiveness to the next level. Smartwatches silently, instantly alert the wearer to an urgent task, shaving precious seconds or minutes off the response. It’s no surprise, then, that smartwatch sales are on a sharp upswing, as their ability to enhance productivity and communications comes into clearer focus.

And now, Samsung software called Vantage allows businesses to send and receive any kind of alert to smartwatches and other devices, from any kind of business application.

Vantage collects key analytics, such as when a worker acknowledges and then completes a task, to help businesses measure and improve service levels. Working together, Vantage and wearables bring instant communication, responsiveness and accountability to any time-sensitive business process.

The Advantage of Fast

A speedy response has a measurable effect in any industry. Cutting the elapsed time from when a task first emerges — such as a customer walking in, a part running low, etc. — to initiating a response can make a huge impact. Enabled by the right task management technology, wearables are transforming business across diverse industries. Here are just a few examples:

Powering Business Processes With Alerts

To do their best work, smartwatches must be connected to a central communication platform. Typically task management tools manage these communications, but most don’t speak the special language of smartwatches, which enables them to parse alerts into the streamlined format that makes for the most effective, succinct messages.

Samsung Vantage works with Tizen, the open source software platform used for mobile devices, to facilitate this communication. Vantage can stand on its own to send and receive alerts and notifications, managed via a centralized dashboard. It can also be integrated with line-of-business applications, to convert any data field into one that can send and receive notifications. For example, if a field is altered in a customer relationship management application, developers can use Vantage APIs to enable an alert to or from the smartwatches, smartphones, tablets or laptops in use by the sales team.

Vantage also stands apart from typical task management applications through several enterprise-friendly features.

The application also enables location mapping, push-to-talk and one-to-many messaging.

Using Analytics to Measure and Inform Business Practices

If the speed of completing a task is important to a business, then so is measurement. Vantage time-stamps every step: when a message is sent, when the recipient acknowledges it and when a task is completed. That data enables a company to identify areas for improvement — increasing staffing, changing processes and so on — to improve response time, as well as identify best practices that can be shared with other locations.

Samsung SDS America Vantage differentiates from traditional task management applications with its deep, built-in analytics capabilities, which collects this data and provides in-app reporting for real-time visibility into the status of tasks. By leveraging smartwatches and Vantage, businesses can set themselves apart from competitors and win over demanding customers with next-level productivity and responsiveness.

See how wearables are streamlining task management and improving safety for mobile workers in this infographic, or download our free white paper on improving employee wellness with wearables.