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Imagine how difficult a journey would be if you could only use one means of transport. You can either walk, ride a bike, ride a horse, catch a plane, get the bus, the tube, drive, or get the train. You’re not going to get anywhere fast if you can’t mix them up.
Did your mobile-first strategy get stuck in a mobile-online rut?
In the past few years many brands have been offering the same level of inconvenience for their customers. And the irony is this has been with the aim of enabling their customers to interact with them when they’re out and about. Companies have been under pressure to enable their customers to interact with them using mobile devices, and adopted a “mobile first” strategy as a result. In too many cases this translated into “mobile only”. Having delivered on mobile all too often they’ve then woken up to the fact they’re stuck with a large investment in mobile technology that prevents them from delivering an omni-channel customer experience. The result is a lot of brands and customers are stuck in a mobile rut.
The fact is more than 40% of customers’ research activities prior to a purchase take place across at least 2 digital devices*. Therefore any silo’ed single-channel experiences reduce a brand’s ability to understand and respond to the customer need and often results in irrelevant, disjointed and high volume communication.
A complete customer journey encompasses more than just the mobile experience and it is not about devices or even about device types, it is about convenience and the effortless way in which customers can interact with a brand in a continuous and uninterrupted way, on their terms, wherever they are in their journey.
Your customers want to be engaged in an on-going, value-driven relationship with a brand who understands and responds to their needs and choices. In turn you need to enable your brand to be capable of delivering that.
| What your customers need | What you need to be capable of |
| Convenience: When they want, wherever they want and however they want
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Allow the customer to use any channel or device to access information and contribute.
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| Effortless: Make it easy for me, suggest things to me that are relevant
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Use insight about your customer to push relevant information at the appropriate time to them on their channel or device of choice
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| Information: I am busy so make information quick to consume
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Deliver consistent content and messages regardless of where and how they access the information
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| Contribute: Let me participate in conversations
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Listen to customers as it is not always only what they say that give your insights it is also what they do and where they do it.
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| Continuous: Know where I am in my journey and help me along it so I don’t have to start over or take backwards or unnecessary steps.
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Know where they are on their journey and allow them to continue that journeys wherever and whenever they want and learn when it is appropriate to help them along the journey so the outcome can deliver the value they expected.
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| Uninterrupted: I want to communicate at my convenience and need you to understand my context to know when I wish to be contacted. | Understand where, when, how and why they interact and use those insights and preferences to engage with them when it is relevant and appropriate to them not your organisation. |
How can you move your brand beyond mobile, or for that matter any specific channel?
- Maximise your existing investment in mobile and make it part of your broader omni-channel customer engagement ecosystem.
- Listen to customer behaviour to understand how they are using the application, what type of information they are looking for, when they are using which mobile device and where they are using it, for example at home, close to a branch, etc.
- Translate your customer data into deep insights about customers’ preferences, interests and expectations.
- Map every mobile interaction into the broader customer omni-channel journey.
- Use journey context to develop insight about which channels customers prefer to use at which points in their journey.
- The insight into cross-channel behaviour is key to understanding when people are moving away from mobile to other channels to continue their journey because of a lack of information or the right level of information available in the mobile app.
- Use these omni-channel customer insights (interests, preferences, etc.) and journey context to personalise the mobile experience with relevant and appropriate content delivered in a timely manner.
- Bring all the capabilities required to support your customers’ demands and expectations to your mobile ecosystem quickly and under control of those business users closest to the customer.
You will improve your brand’s understanding of your customers’ needs based on their physical and digital interactions across channels, devices and touchpoints. This, in turn, will bring you greater ROI from your marketing with upsell and cross sell campaigns and higher customer satisfaction scores. In other words, if you break free of the chains of channels you’ll be rewarded with the prizes of true customer engagement.
You can be that pioneer who changes a silo channel stuck in a rut today to where you could multiply the ROI from mobile and all your other channels. You can be the one to come to the rescue. Will you seize the day?
This guest blog post was written by Ray Gerber, Chief Technology Officer and SVP of WW Engineering at Thunderhead.
"Did Your Mobile-First Strategy Get Stuck in a Mobile-Online Rut?" was originally published on Thunderhead News & Views page.
Click here for Ray's full biography.