Frontline teams know the ability to communicate in groups and one-to-one is critical to productivity and safety. Today’s enterprises are faced with a plethora of bad options.

Further, communication technology for the frontline workforce has a track record of being underinvested, uninspired, and limited to push-to-talk (PTT) without photos, videos, files, and text (not really) sharing.

So how do companies with a deskless workforce know which voice solution is right for them?

Let’s take a look at the options:

• Radios
• Digital radios
• Cell phones
• Push-to-talk (PTT) apps
• Collaboration platforms

We’ll help you understand why all these communication options, except for an advanced voice-first intelligent collaboration platform, are unable to support the needs of today’s enterprises.

Get the Future of Voice at Work E-Book

The Basics: How Do Radios Work?

Radios offer two-way push-to-talk communications between radio receivers, typically on a land mobile radio (LMR) system. Commercial radios require a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in order to use a designated frequency for two-way communication.

Diagram of a basic LMR system. Source: cisa.gov

Unfortunately, radio technology is very slow to change and is decades behind modern solutions. Radios have limited value and offer an unwieldy form factor with an extremely limited range and low audio quality. In fact, there are at least a dozen reasons radios hold your company back.

A Small Improvement: How Do Digital Radios Work?

Like analog radios, digital radio users still have to purchase FCC licenses. Digital radios operate similarly to their predecessors but conserve LMR spectrum usage by compressing audio. However, this means digital radio audio is low-quality, distorted, and often irritating to those listening.

Even though digital radios might sound innovative, the truth is that they don’t have much more innovation to offer than analog radios. Poor coverage. No process automation. No map display. No situational intelligence. No instant message replay for end users. And no photos, no videos, no files, no easy-to-use text messaging.

Learn the 12 Reasons Radios Hold Your Company Back

The Next Iteration: How Do Push-to-Talk (PTT) Apps Work?

PTT apps were created to be the next evolution of radios. In the mid-1990s, Nextel created one of the first iterations of PTT that worked on cellular networks and connected people at any distance. This feature was initially exciting but quickly overshadowed by smartphones for personal use. However, organizations with a deskless workforce took notice of its utility compared with traditional radios.

Organizations are often drawn to push-to-talk apps because they are instantly scalable, unlike radios. Users are not locked into expensive radio hardware and can instead push-to-talk on any Android or iOS smart device. However, some PTT apps are tied to specific communications providers like AT&T or Verizon. These services lock you into their cellular networks and prevent choice and flexibility.

It’s important to note that most push-to-talk apps perform poorly and provide no path to innovation. Several popular PTT apps notoriously lack encryption, creating large security and compliance risks for organizations.

PTT apps simply don’t do enough to solve the many problems with radios or enable frontline teams to achieve meaningful innovation (like automation, intelligence amplification, and analytics) and digital transformation.

Frankly, frontline teams need so much more than a simple communication point solution that PTT apps provide. That’s where Orion comes in.

What Features and Solutions Should Enterprise PTT Apps Offer?

The best PTT apps don’t just provide communication. Yes, they must work over unlimited distance and provide high-quality audio. They must also be secure, encrypted, and support Android and iOS devices.

To learn more about everything you should consider in a push-to-talk app, take a moment to get the Collaboration Solution Buyers Guide.

Voice for Today’s Enterprise: How Does the Orion PTT and Collaboration Platform Work?

Now more than ever before, leading organizations are turning to collaboration software like Orion to empower their deskless workers, create their connected workforces, and digitally transform frontline teams.

Modern Communications & Multimodal Collaboration

Organizations can collaborate at any distance, on any network, on any device. Orion builds on its high-quality audio PTT abilities with secure multimodal collaboration, including voice, text, photos, videos, and files such as PDFs. The platform also has the highest levels of security with end-to-end-encryption (E2EE). Secure, voice-first, multimodal collaboration is table stakes for connecting a deskless workforce to a digital organization.

Operations Console

Operations centralize control with Orion’s web-based console that provides situational intelligence, mapping, and advanced location services. Management gains real-time visibility to see all worker locations on a single screen. These location services provide analytics that help organizations optimize operations, increase productivity, and improve worker safety.

Once organizations have modernized communications with Orion’s voice-first, multimodal collaboration, they can innovate with process automation, intelligence amplification, and analytics — ultimately creating a voice operations system of record.

Process Automation

Orion’s process automation handles repetitive and routine tasks so the deskless workforce can focus on higher-value work. Orion standardizes a number of processes including routine checklists, safety SOPs, regulatory requirements, lone worker emergencies, and geolocation-based check-ins. With process automation, frontline workers stay hands-free, heads-up, and focused on their job in both routine and urgent situations.

Intelligence Amplification

The Orion platform amplifies employee intelligence by providing real-time context and access to systems, data, and SMEs to dramatically improve worker output, optimize processes, and increase productivity. The frontline workforce can now learn more about new processes and products in real time by connecting them to manuals and best-practice guides — all from their point of work. Intelligence Amplification becomes the path that truly connects the deskless workforce to the rest of the digital enterprise.

Analytics

Orion’s collaboration software enables organizations to optimize and gain insights into the day-to-day operations across the deskless workforce to maximize overall performance. Orion captures 100% of the message stream, including location data, automated processes, and all messages sent and received. This allows managers to measure, optimize, and report performance.

Choosing the Right Voice Solution

Why settle for a lesser voice solution like radios or simple PTT apps?

Orion’s collaboration platform creates a path for true innovation and digitalization for enterprises and their deskless workforces — well beyond anything radios and PTT apps could ever imagine possible.

Learn how Orion’s Collaboration Platform offers more than PTT with unprecedented team voice-first, multimodal collaboration, operational control, process automation, intelligence amplification, analytics, and more.

Learn How Orion Drives Innovation

You might also like:

• 3 Reasons Orion’s Multimodal Frontline Collaboration Platform is Critical for Operating a Digital Organization With a Connected Deskless Workforce
• E-book: 12 Reasons Radios Are Holding Your Company Back
• Infographic: 23 Facts About Collaboration Software for the Deskless Workforce
• E-book: The Future of Voice at Work

Navigate the 5-Step Journey to Creating Your Digital Deskless Workforce With a Voice-First Intelligent Collaboration Platform

80% of the global workforce performs deskless work. Yet, all too often deskless workers are left behind during discussions and planning of the digital enterprise and instead have to rely on radio technology from the 1940s or push-to-talk (PTT) apps with no path for innovation.

Orion is the voice-first intelligent collaboration platform to change this.

Get the E-book

When Orion created the voice-first intelligent collaboration platform, we knew we were solving problems much bigger than simple PTT apps and radios’ poor coverage and audio quality, unwieldy form factor, and unreasonable costs for limited value. We knew we were empowering a much-too-often overlooked yet crucial part of our workforce: the deskless worker.

Companies are on a path to innovation, and leading organizations are discovering that in order for digital transformation to drive real productivity and value, they must connect their deskless workers to the rest of the digital enterprise.

In The Future of Voice at Work, we define the concepts of digital transformation and the connected worker and what those concepts mean for the deskless workforce. You’ll read about the amount of value your organization stands to achieve with digital transformation and how leading companies are digitally connecting deskless workers to the rest of their organization following the stages of Modernization and Innovation in the Orion Innovation Model.

Discover the Orion Innovation Model

In the e-book, you’ll see how Orion’s platform takes your deskless workforce, and ultimately your organization, through the stages of Modernization and Innovation following the Orion Innovation Model. This model was created by Orion’s technology leaders and is used by industry-leading companies.

Following the Orion Innovation Model, The Future of Voice at Work is broken out into two distinct sections:

Section 1: Modernizing Communications

In this section, we follow the above first two steps in the Orion Innovation Model and explain how collaboration software modernizes and enhances the functions your deskless workforce performs today.

You’ll learn why fast, reliable, and secure multimodal communication should be table stakes for your organization’s modern deskless workforce. You’ll also discover how to coordinate and centralize operational visibility, management, and decision making with operational control.

Section 2: Innovating Operations

In this section, we cover the upper three layers of the above Orion Innovation Model and show how a collaboration platform creates a path for true innovation and digitalization for your deskless workforce and your organization — well beyond anything radios and PTT apps could ever imagine possible.

You’ll learn about how leading organizations are using process automation, intelligence amplification, and analytics to drive profit for their businesses and make them more efficient and productive.

This all ultimately culminates in improved employee productivity, customer engagement, and safety and compliance.

Download The Future of Voice at Work to learn:

• How Orion’s platform creates a connected workforce
• How radios are last-century technology and holding your organization back
• How a voice-first intelligent collaboration platform enables digital transformation for your deskless workers
• And so much more

By the end of this e-book, you should have a clear and complete understanding of how you can empower your deskless workforce and enable digital transformation for your entire organization by using a powerful, intelligent collaboration platform.

It’s time to discover the future of voice at work. Get the free e-book today!

Get the E-book

You might also like:

• E-book: 12 Reasons Radios Are Holding Your Company Back
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• Three Ways a Voice-First Multimodal Collaboration Platform Improves Team Operations, Performance, and Communications for Heavy Industries
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• Transportation and Logistics Communications Need to Move Beyond Push-to-Talk and Radios

Transportation and logistics operations urgently need to adopt new, intelligent communications solutions.  In today’s dynamic environment, frontline workers require fast, reliable, and automated communication and information retrieval methods.

Old communication methods do not offer the support needed to rapidly respond to dynamic demands.  Shipments and routings can change at a moment’s notice — for example, containers relocated in the port, urgent deliveries added to a driver’s route, or inventory reallocated following a surge in demand.

Transportation and logistics companies are large, complex, and distributed

In the trucking industry alone, there are over 500,000 U.S. companies operating over 15 million vehicles, employing an estimated 8.9 million Americans, including nearly 3.5 million drivers.  Rail, port, airport, warehouse, trucking, and delivery operations must all be tightly connected, but safety dictates that teams remain undistracted.

Despite the industry’s complexity of needs, companies have been laggard investors in digital transformation.  Transportation and logistics companies need an instant, reliable collaboration solution to meet a multitude of requirements — including the abilities to streamline operations, control costs, improve safety, and delight customers.  Investment in digital transformation to meet these needs is now possible with a platform like Orion.

Push-to-talk communication is no longer enough

In the age of enterprise technology, traditional push-to-talk radios are severely limited in their capabilities.  The antiquated land mobile radio, first deployed during World War II, used to be the primary communication tool of choice.  However, as frontline workers know, the radio no longer meets the needs of a complex logistical operation.

Radio communications require huge investments in infrastructure plus specialized knowledge to configure.  Even when properly configured, radios can’t tell dispatchers where drivers or assets are, which vehicles are in motion, or even who’s online and listening.  The outdated devices are also hampered by range limitations that can disconnect teams at critical moments.  Finally, radios only connect people, not systems — and radios are unable to automate processes or retrieve data quickly.

Fortunately, contemporary technology has produced compelling alternatives to radios.  Advances in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing have converged to enable powerful workstream collaboration for transportation and logistics operations.

When voice becomes data, operations become smarter

The Orion intelligent voice-first platform provides the most agile and secure global communication and voice automation technology available in the world today.  Workers still get that familiar push-to-talk experience and instant team communication that made radios so useful.  But by turning voice into data, Orion transforms speech into sophisticated automatic processes.

By integrating data like spoken keywords, speaker identity, location, movement, images, and sensor details into a communications stream, Orion provides unprecedented intelligence to both the enterprise and its frontline workers.  This enables digital workflows and process automation. Leveraging real-time location data, a geo-fence automates notifications for arrival and departure and automatically deploys assets for loading and unloading.  Voice commands can notify a team of new tasks to be done or pause an industrial operation in an emergency.

Voice commands also enable access to business-critical information.  Instead of using a radio to summon a person to provide an answer, or scurrying to find a desktop computer, workers can directly query the company’s systems, speeding up operations and empowering teams to work more independently.

Digital transformation has come to all industries.  Now is the moment for transportation and logistics leaders to implement new technologies, automate manual processes, and unlock data silos in their frontline operations.  The Orion intelligent voice-first platform is the foundation of digital transformation for the global transportation and logistics sector.

Learn more about Orion solutions for Transportation & Logistics.

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• Voice in the Workplace Report
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• Orion solutions for Dispatchers