Mobile CX Trends: Time for Marketers to Press for More Control

Mobile CX

To Deliver Hyper-Personalized Experiences At Scale, Mobile Is The Go-To Space For Marketers.

Customer Experience (CX) is the top priority for brand marketers in the digital age. While IoT, social, video, omnichannel messaging, automation, and data continue to showcase their importance in a modern CMO’s stack, CX could be the differentiator to add that sophisticated touch to omnichannel marketing campaigns.

To deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale, mobile is the go-to space for marketers. Mobile offers the ultimate option for 1:1 interactions and engagement through brand apps. You can then call upon the necessary Martech stack to deliver a mobile CX that runs on relevancy and meaningfulness. It adds a lot of gravitas to your engagement with customers.

Why Press For More Control In Mobile CX?

  • 22% of client-side marketers believe that at present, the most exciting opportunity in marketing is ‘optimization of CX’ (Econsultancy)
  • In 2017, an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes in the US were spent on mobile per day
  • Almost 75% of US adults use smartphones (eMarketer)

To stand out of the clutter and marketing noise, brands need to ask, “Where’s my customer?”

The app and smartphone revolution make it a no-brainer to get the answer right — ‘mobile’. The exponential rise of B2Cs like Airbnb and Uber has a case in point for B2Bs. They transformed the CX on a space where customers live. Hence, mobile CX. CMOs and their teams need to quickly admit and acknowledge mobile as a lifestyle not a platform or channel. Today, delivering the right CX is quite a disruptor.

Also Read: Follow That Puck: Multi-Channel, Multi-Location Marketing Is Moving into the 21st Century… Are You?

Mobile CX is Your Moneyball

You shouldn’t be surprised if you soon hear a designation titled – Chief Experience Officer. Chief Customer Officers are already in place, and together with marketing teams, they’re mapping tasks to ensure that at each touchpoint and point of sale (or rather, ‘moments of truth’), CX gets optimized. All such efforts are great, but such miens may not yield much if there’s no strategy to deliver an optimized mobile CX.

Where most marketers falter:

  • Treating mobile like just another distribution and ad channel
  • Same strategy for mobile as for print, TV, OOH, and desktop
  • Dealing with mobile as a tech innovation wave or a private interface
  • Creating a mobile-first element, then pushing customers to other channels

All of the above pitfalls lead to poor mobile CX. Mobile is where we live – shop, read, transact, play, communicate, and do a hell lot more. There’s an app for everything – Strava to Trello!

Respect the Customer Journeys; Let them be in the Driving Seat

Remember, that you don’t own customer journeys. Your customers own them. Nobody likes to be told that it’s either this way or no way. Funnels, ABM strategies, KAM, and the likes are good, but for an optimized mobile CX, ‘push’ strategies are now a passé.

There’s no definite course to customer journeys. There’s acceleration, deceleration, detours, U-turns, and more. It’s like a backpacking traveler who wants to be in control but not in a hurry to rush and decide what’s next. This means that the best start to mobile CX is by putting your customers well and truly in the driving seat.

Indeed you need to also ensure that customer journeys head towards a direction where you want them to. But, if you think closely, in a space like mobile, this can be very seamless. You empower your customers to decide and choose. They choose what they desire. And, we all desire value. For instance, it can be as basic as updates. When you force an update installation, you leave the mobile user with no choice. It can then lead to uninstalls very soon. Instead, when a user adds a product to cart or is about to transact, this is where a value proposition for the update is timely. It could range from cashback offers to freebies on store visits or enhanced usability features like ‘live chat’ support.

Thus, even before people become your customers officially, value creation ought to start from your end. Good ‘pull’ strategies are about providing value which makes a difference or resolves a pain-point. That value transpires to CX. Mobile CX is all about addition of functionalities and removal of frictions.

Also Read: Your Buyers are Online: Why Aren’t You?

Mobile is Never Offline

We shut down TVs, radios, keep newspapers aside, and turn a blind eye to an OOH when we’ve other things on our plate. But how many people do you know who shut down their mobiles? In fact, we get unsettled if there’s no network or when it says ‘battery low’. In addition to being always online, another factor that sets mobile apart is that it’s capable of hosting end-to-end customer journeys. Be it discovery, purchase, or loyalty programs, it’s all in the palm.

One sector to have made the most of ‘mobile is never offline’ is retail and ecommerce. Or at least they were the B2C pioneers, and B2Bs soon followed suits. Target, Whole Foods, and Starbucks deliver cutting-edge in-store mobile CX by integrating behavior, mobile transactions, and loyalty programs.

Here’re a few examples:

Other sectors are now taking note. Events offer tremendous ground for mobile experiences. Most will agree that Dreamforce is an event where mobile CX gets a notch higher every year. Gamification is also touching new highs with app advancements and serves as a great mobile engagement hook. With facets like reward systems, game dynamics can be integrated with mobile apps to enhance both mobile UX and CX.  Plecto, GetBadges, Kahoot!, and others are doing that. Interactive content is another cool hook and SnapApp, Playbuzz, Toluna, and others have taken that to mobiles.

Foster and Prosper in the Mobile App Ecosystem: CX Rules!

  • Customers consider apps to be the primary digital interface with their favorite brands (Gartner)
  • 90% of time spent on mobile is on brand apps (Smart Insights)
  • 85% of customers prefer mobile apps to mobile websites as they are easier to browse, faster, and more convenient (Print in the Mix)

Here’re some of the top mobile app developers in the US that help deliver telling CX:

The extent of delight and surprise that mobile apps can provide is like no other. Everybody loves information that is packed with entertainment. Apps can do that. They streamline the entire conversion process for you as well with in-app purchases. Room for creativity and innovation is big here since through apps, you can offer immersive interactions via taps, swipes or shakes. Mobile CX starts with engagement and ends with your value-add proposition.

Don’t miss the mobile CX bus. And, once you’re on it, don’t forget that all of this planning and strategizing could count for naught if you’re missing the tech stack. Your tech stack is what brings your app to life. Marketing teams and API engineers or developers need to be in tune like an orchestra for an app to deliver the desired mobile CX.

Also Read: Digital Experience Data Reveals Customer Experience Isn’t Just for the Holidays

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Abhinandan Ghosh

Abhinandan, an E&I engineer and MBA had an innate enthusiasm for all things tech since his early days. That blended with his penchant towards writing definitive, consummate content to brew a heavy career concoction of unsurpassed high. Ever since, he has embraced content regimes across business precincts such as industrial automation, events, ecommerce, IT, and now, martech. He is an aficionado of all sub-genres of Trance music, an ardent culinary peregrine, and loves backpacking trips.

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