Putting your Customers and Mobile First
In the fast paced technology landscape, with ever-changing devices and bright shiny object syndrome, it’s easy to lose sight of the overall objective. How does a company innovate, stand out, and fulfil the desires of their customers while remaining on-brand and maximising ROI? In the mobile era, where a smartphone is never out of arm’s reach – putting your customer first means putting your mobile strategy first.
Never Stop Experimenting
Starbucks has embraced mobile, they continually test and trial to find better ways to connect with their customers. Easy payment solutions for their devoted coffee drinkers, new ways to acquire customers and engage those customers, for profitable gain, through proven strategies. They’ve uncluttered their customer’s wallet, providing a unique rewards and gift card scheme, offered charging stations to consumers on the go who need more than one kind of juice (coffee & power) and in a company announcement made yesterday, which saw the share price rise by 0.9%, they will also test a way for customer to order items ahead of time with their smartphones.
Active mobile users have just tipped the 10m mark and half of all Starbucks’ mobile users are gold status members meaning they make 30+ purchases linked to their reward card per year. The other half, many being recipients of the 2013 Christmas gifting card, are reported to be new customers for Starbucks, presenting a huge opportunity to convert these customers into loyal members.
As in-store US mobile payments moved from 10% (July 2013) to 14% (March 2014) there is a clear motivation for the experimentation culture within the mobile space to continue.
Don’t be Afraid to Change your Strategy
Facebook’s HTML 5 misery was well documented with substandard user experiences on the mobile website. Mark Zuckerburg commented in a Tech Crunch interview “the biggest mistake that we made as a company is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native because it just wasn’t there,” and “since we’ve done the iOS app we’ve seen double the amount of feeds people consume.”
Zuckerberg went on to say, “There are mobile experiences out there that are so good, that … we need to have the highest quality, and the only way is doing native.”
Customers expect more. Those who don’t innovate get left behind. Luckily for Facebook they pivoted on their strategy and embraced native apps. Continuing to innovate they’ve introduced Paper (Link:https://www.facebook.com/paper) to the US market. As Facebook strives to combine personal and world news together in a seamless enjoyable experience, their constant innovation ensures Facebook remains front and centre on the mobile home screen of their users.
The Future
So what are the next steps for these companies that have championed the mobile (and customer) first strategy? Moving forward there will continue to be a plethora of mobile products that focus on:
- Making life easier for your customers;
- Making purchasing easier – like the send or schedule a present to your friends on Facebook, with digital or instore gift cards for Facebook customers in the US – including Best Buy, Fandango and our old friend Starbucks.
- Cross promotion of services, optimising any customer contact opportunities, either in person or through friends. It’s easy to see how, in the near future, we’ll be able to send a gift to a friend who receives it on their mobile and as they wander past the store, an iBeacon alert entices them into the store to redeem their coffee.
People are reaching out to your customers all the time, if you’re not, then you can bet that your competition is.
If you’re not sure where to start, you don’t need to do it on your own. Engage experts (/services/Experience-Engineering) who can cut through the fluff to get to the heart of your client’s deepest desires and show how you can make your customers loyal and happy with your new and sparkling customer centric mobile strategy.
