There’s no denying that most industries nowadays are undergoing a shift that’s faster than the revolution the business landscape went through when it replaced and integrated traditional processes with digital ones. Today, going online is no longer the benchmark businesses have to meet in order to provide a complete and convenient customer experience. Similarly, the definition of tech-savvy digital marketing strategy is no longer limited to having web-based tools carry out requests of your modern consumers.
What people demand nowadays is omnipresence from the brands they support. And this is mainly achieved by making customer service and e-commerce services available via mobile. The usual services that you originally give via the Internet now need to be accessible on smartphones and tablets too. Email and live chat would no longer suffice, as more and more users demand to get assistance from social media, customer relations apps, and even SMS.
What customers expect from you
A Forrester research claimed that people who look for and contact companies using their smartphones expect businesses they will be dealing with to be mobile-ready. For 62% of customers, this means having a mobile-friendly website, while 42% expect you to have a mobile app, and 23% want your services and transactions to be location-specific.
To be able to keep up, most companies build apps that people can use to get answers on their own or reach you without having to go through cues and complicated phone menus. Truly innovative ones, on the other hand, design complete mobile engagement plans. In order to do this, the same Forrester research shared the following steps that you need to take:
• Identify the mobile moments and context
• Design the mobile engagement
• Engineer your processes, platforms, and people for mobile
• Analyze results to monitor and optimize
What changes you can expect
For one, there would be an influx of customer service, marketing, and e-commerce apps in the coming years. In Apple’s US App Store alone, 958,000 apps are available for download last year. In 2020, that number is expected to reach 10 million because of the mobile shift.
Mobile device adoption will also grow: from 154 million tablet owners in 2012, there will be 651 million of them in 2017. Smartphone users will likewise balloon from 1.2 billion two years ago, to 2.5 billion three years from now.
The shift will not only be felt among the smartphone-toting market; every industry, market, and economy will experience this. Forrester said in The Mobile Mind Shift, its recently published book, that in 2007, “firms will spend $189 billion to engineer platforms and processes for mobile engagement. They’ll drive $1.3 trillion of the IT economy with systems of engagement.”
Given that the shift is massively happening right now, businesses should ready themselves by pulsing their market and its needs. In fact, you should have made the transition years ago when mobile is only budding. If you are yet to embrace mobile, it’s time to make the shift now.