BUSINESS OPTIMISATION NEEDS A MOBILE APPROACH

6TH AUGUST 2015, SYDNEY AUSTRALIA. The best opportunity that businesses have to improve their productivity comes from making the most of mobile technologies.  That’s the perspective of the founders of rapporr, a mobile-first communication and business organisation application, launching this month. 

Co-founders of the new mobile business messaging app, David Anstee and Peter Tippett, say that widespread mobile technology adoption is a rationale for development of business management tools that are designed for access from mobile devices.  They argue that too many business communication tools are focused on the desktop environment, and this limits their effectiveness in retail, hospitality and other industries where workers are constantly on the move. 

 “In Australia, we already have more phones than people, so it makes sense to think about how you can improve business by taking advantage of that device penetration,”said Anstee.  “And for small businesses, clubs and community groups at large, the mobile is already the life blood of the day to day operation. So it’s not as if you have to teach people to use a new piece of kit.  It’s something that they’re already comfortable with.”

 The Sydney-based startup has built a business communication and employee engagement tool designed to overcome the problem with messaging overload. But while there are a number of mobile business messaging applications in the marketplace, there are few that allow highly specialised employee management and engagement.

 “As human beings and workers, we’re suffering from messaging overload,”said Tippett. “In office email systems, we just get too many messages to effectively follow conversations, or to be part of any decision making system.  And to some extent mobile device use has compounded that, because messages just keep coming in every hour of the day or night with little effect.” 

 Tippett said the idea for rapporr came from his own frustration with contacting the membership Bondi Surf Life Saving club when he was its Director of Lifesaving. “We had 400 patrolling members, and we often only wanted to contact a small segment of those members, but we couldn’t easily distinguish between various elements of the membership, and getting them to be part of any decision making process was a nightmare.” 

 A software developer by trade, Tippett decided to build his own messaging solution. But while he was solving a problem for himself, he recognised that there was an opportunity to do so much more than build a better messaging system.  “If you’re going to build business management tools for mobile devices, you might as well facilitate collaboration, decision making, training - everything,”he said.

 The result of his experimentation and development was rapporr, an application for iOS and Android that enables businesses to engage roving team members. Designed to assist people who are on their feet in retail environments, or performing sales or other tasks out of the office, the application has been created to manage teams of people with functional components including expedient decision support, communication and quick translation. 

But once the system was tested by small groups, the Founders discovered that the solution they built was overcoming a series of problems facing mobilised workers not just in Sydney, but across the world. The way that rapporr individualises and contextualised messages means that rapporr is solving information overload problems faced in almost any business. 

 “Companies are finding it hard to contact their networks of employees, distributors and suppliers, because everyone is unsubscribing from email,”said Tippett.  “What’s needed is not a way to replace email as such, but rather a way to ensure that messages that people do receive are timely, context-specific and are at least as good as SMS for delivering personalised communication. That’s what we’ve built and that’s what’s exciting our investors and clients here in Australia as well as overseas.”

 The company has been backed by private investors and is preparing for its next funding round before the end of 2015. rapporr is being rolled out to its first of a long list of clients this month including cafes, gardening centres and the Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club.  The app is now live in the App Store and on Google’s Play Store.

For further information, please contact:

Jannicke Climax, Marketing & Communications Manager, rapporr

0487 811 555

jannicke@rapporr.com