Designing the best mobile customer experience
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a series of recent articles from Lenati’s blog.
As mobile becomes the common denominator guiding, informing and influencing the customer through their journey, the opportunity to increase ROI through mobile is growing exponentially.
Companies must start by developing a clear understanding of customer needs and how mobile offerings can serve those needs. Only then can they make strategic decisions regarding purpose, features and overall user experience. These strategic goals in turn determine what must be measured and what defines success.
Guiding Frameworks
1. Customer Needs
Companies should consider what needs different sets of customers have and how they can solve them through mobile features. Consider these questions:
- What purposes do our customers have for mobile interaction with our company?
- At what points during daily life will they be using mobile to interact with us?
- What unique customer journeys must mobile accommodate?
- Which features are necessary to aid these journeys?
- How will customers control their own "destiny" within our mobile universe, and find the experience that fits their context and purpose?
2. Customer Journeys
Companies need to develop an understanding of the context in which customers will be using mobile. Will it be for:
- On-the-go shopping? This type of experience must be easy, fun, visual, and fast.
- Transaction facilitation? This type of experience must remove friction in customer transactions and speed and ease the customer experience.
- Physical space augmentation? This type of experience must provide useful services to make physical interactions more engaging, informative and smooth.
- Entertainment? This type of experience should draw customers to the mobile experience and act as a starting point for engagement.
3. Customer Measurement
Mobile apps make measuring customer activities easy. But it’s important to focus on only a few key performance indicators when determining if the customer experience is working. And some of those customer experience measures need to be outside the mobile environment, such as the number of service interactions required by mobile users before the experience is perfected. Consider:
- Customer adoption and retention measures, such as adoption rates, drop-out rates and use frequency;
- Customer engagement measures, pitting features against each other in a competition for highest-use;
- Customer service measures, counting not only digital service interactions like chat, email or pushing a call button, but also recording physical service interactions when employees help mobile customers get set-up.
Discussion Questions
How should retailers and brands guide the design and measurement of the mobile shopping experience? What would you add to the suggestions in the article?
Poll
BrainTrust
Adrian Weidmann
Managing Director, StoreStream Metrics, LLC
Mark Heckman
Principal, Mark Heckman Consulting
When designing the mobile shopping experience it’s a good idea to observe the actual mobile shopping experience. That means watching what people do with their mobile devices during the shopping process — before, during and after. What people say they do and transaction information gleaned from online data is not enough to effectively guide the design of improved, engaging and influential mobile content.
Yes, it’s important to answer the questions in the article. But those answers should be derived from actually seeing how shoppers move through the experience not an abstract account of the experience.
Regardless of your intentions, if you don’t create a mobile solution from a customer-centric point of view that is valued by the shopper, it will not succeed. Mobile apps, with a few exceptions, have simply failed to capture the attention and consistent use by shoppers.
We are all digitally empowered shoppers. Before drinking the KoolAid, ask yourself (better yet—observe yourself) how and why you use your mobile device on your shopping journey. Then and only then design and activate a solution that you, as a shopper, would use consistently and value.
I believe the real potential for in-store mobile shopper solutions lies in technologies that bridge mobile devices with either digital or static merchandising/signage initiatives. Technology that delivers brand storytelling, price comparison, customer reviews, “how to,” data driven, coupons/discounting through opt-in rich media content holds tremendous potential.
Local, fast, easy and valuable for the shopper will win the day.
With an array of new metrics that comes with mobile shopper engagement, we shan’t forget that retailers are interesting in cogently linking the new metrics with the more “bankable” ones. Simply put, it all comes down to incremental behavior that results in incremental sales and profits for the retailer.
As one example, effectively linking and correlating the effect of such new metrics such as adoption rates and drop out rates with store transactions and transaction size elevates the medium to a legitimate “talking point” in the Monday morning meeting. Without it, it won’t make the agenda.
Retailers are quick to try a new app or figure out how to push promos to their customers, however, this suggests a real Customer Experience (CX) project. While it is not a huge investment, retailers seem to know so little about CX that they have been steering clear of starting the conversation.
Any good CX practitioner would tell retailers that they must first know their customers. Not just their demographics, but what their personas are and what they want and expect from the brand. This is a new dimension for many retailers, however, it is the necessary first step.
Those who “get it” will win. For my 2 cents.
The mobile shopping experience is gaining exponential importance among consumers, and those retailers who utilize this framework of understanding and designing around customer needs, the customer journey and customer measurement are positioning themselves with an advantage. Executed well, retailers also need to design the experience around delivering a highly intentional and consistent experience.
This is a great article that recognizes how to use mobile—and the benefits to both the customers and the retailer.
The bottom line is, will the customer embrace your mobile strategy? Just like designing a store, the mobile experience has to be very customer focused. Everything you design into the strategy must always keep the customer in mind. That doesn’t mean the customer holds you hostage to decisions you make. It means you are considering the impact to the customer’s experience.
The framework above is apropos. Not only is it focused without being restrictive, it results in more creative executions. Of the three categories noted above, the second is the most valuable. The mobile experience should be designed by the stages of the customer journey.
Urban Outfitters offers great examples. The Urban On app amplifies the in-store experience based on where shoppers are. Examples:
1. Are they at the entrance? UO messages them to log in through social media to personalize their visit.
2. Are they in the dressing room? They are prompted to share their outfits with social media followers in return for exclusive offers.
3. Are they at checkout? The app suggests they shake their smartphone to generate a loyalty barcode.