Podcast

565: Zinc – Communication Technology For The Deskless Worker

It would be tempting to put Zinc – founded by two former Yammer employees – into the same bucket with Slack, Atlassian, Microsoft Teams and the myriad other “team collaboration” tools that have popped up in recent years. But Zinc is a mobile messaging app aimed at a completely different audience.

In fact, most of Zinc’s users don’t have desks. Their “offices” are trucks, delivery vehicles, or far-flung job sites. This is a massive number of users – in fact, according to Google, “deskless workers” account for between 72 and 80 percent of the global workforce.

Deskless workers universally despise email and rarely even use a computer. Zinc, in many cases, will end up replacing pen and paper within an organization. In others, it replaces existing digital tools throughout much of the company, including email and texting.

Think of Zinc as a highly secure, all-mode messaging app meant for business communications. Zinc customers include companies in the construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and hospitality industries who have to be in constant communication with each other to solve on-the-ground problems for customers.

I chat with Stacey Epstein who reveals more about her story and discusses where enterprise communication is heading in the context of deskless workers. We also talk about a recent deal that Zinc struck with GE Digital’s ServiceMax, one designed to allow field service teams to communicate in real-time and also access product information and how GE understands those field workers who are in-the-know work faster, have higher completion rates and are more engaged than those who aren’t.

Useful Links

If you want to gather around a virtual campfire and have a chat or ask me a question, you can message me, leave a virtual voicemail or even buy your friendly podcast host a coffee.