WHAT do a school teacher, a prison guard and a sales director have in common?

Well, more than you’d think. For one, we were all stranded at Kings Cross station late on a Sunday, facing a three-hour delay in travelling north.

The second thing we had in common was that we were all smartphone users of some type.

Three people and about £2,000 worth of technology trying to find out what was going on ... contacting friends and relatives to tell them of our delay and generally getting cold and miserable.

In the world of technology, however, we are not supposed to be the same. I am a business mobile client while the other two had their own consumer contracts.

Current wisdom is that we make our technology choices with differing priorities and we require different things. What I found out on that cold platform is that this wisdom couldn’t be further from the truth.

For those of you that control a company mobile phone account, please take note. Business users and consumer users are the same thing – they are people first and employees second. They need and desire the same rich experience from their devices whether at work or play.

Top of the list for my school teacher was the ability to edit and create documents for lesson plans, while my prison guard contact demanded camera-like performance.

The more they talked about their devices the more I realised I needed the same stuff – with maybe a few extra tweaks. Perhaps a bit more security in my device and the ability to wipe it remotely – but honestly beyond that there was little in it.

None of these people understood or cared about which operating system the device ran – that’s just not important to anyone apart from the geek squad. So the next time I hear an MD tell me his people don’t need these advanced features – even the need to get to the internet on the device – I am going to disagree.

What that MD is missing is the opportunity to boost staff productivity and make their lives easier. A happy workforce, is a productive workforce and with the line between work and home increasingly blurred it’s important a mobile phone device suits their needs for both work and leisure.

Mark Lavender is sales director of telecoms firm CCS Mobile