Creating an effective Mobile Engagement Strategy

We are now living in the living in the age of the customer. What this means is that businesses that have traditionally had an offline presence are focused on developing an online presence and businesses that have purely had an online presence are focused on developing an offline presence.

Customer experience is an integral element of marketing and executives are asking themselves how mobile is impacting customer experiences. In order to win in the age of the customer you have to know who your customers are.

Customers are in the position where they can decide if they wish to opt in or not. This applies to both rational and impulsive consumers. Businesses that wish to maximize the degree to which they can successfully engage with their customers will have to ensure the following in each and every interaction:

Building Trust

Understanding the customer needs

Serving the customer needs

Generating focused insights

Becoming more relevant

An effective engagement strategy will be built on deep analytical insights which inform the technology decisions, business strategy decisions and customer engagement decisions. Executives will have to answer the follow questions in order to assess the effectiveness of customer engagement.

Are we leveraging customer generated data to enable customers to easily discover our products and services?

Do we understand the customer context well enough to serve customers in their mobile interactions?

Are we using customer purchasing data to improve conversion rates online and offline?

Are we collecting data from products to layer on services to give the customer more control?

Traditional marketing and customer feedback is only part of the story, are we tapping into customer mobile data to understand what they really think?

Are we engaging customers in the right moment/context to drive the next purchase or brand engagement?

Online and offline engagement will have to be integrated into the existing business processes, technology platforms and product offerings. Mobile will drive the largest re-engineering of companies since the introduction of the web.

Mobile will have a fundamental impact on all businesses. Businesses will have to serve customers in their moment along their journey which basically means that they are going to directly influence the value chain. There are essentially 3 types of mobile moments. Loyalty Moments, Manufactured Moments and Borrowed moments.

Loyalty Moments – These are the ones that a company owns and their ability to deliver on this will impact customer experience. An example of this is the mobile moments that companies like Starbucks and McDonalds have focused on from the moment that a customer enters a store to the point where they leave.

Manufactured Moments- These are created by a company through sponsored content associated with downloads that run into the tens of millions. Companies promote a product and offer rewards for loyalty and purchases.

Borrowed Moments – These are moments that occur when a company leverages the online presence of another business. This has occurred extensively in Asia where retailers and financial services businesses are linking their mobile content with mobile applications such as We Chat, Line, Whats App and online gaming applications.

Reorganizing any business is never an easy task and companies will have to decide if they are going to change all elements of their operations or focus on trialing in a specific area and then applying it to the rest of the business.

Success will largely depend on a company’s ability to achieve optimal business and people connectivity moments which includes;

Identification of mobile moments and their context

Designing an effective mobile engagement

Engineering processes, technology platforms and people to deliver on these moments

Analyzing results (data) and monitoring performance to optimize outcomes.

For more visit us on the web at:   http://mdms.asia or contact me directly at desmond@mdms.asia