In today’s world, more and more people are choosing to do everything from their smartphones. Ordering dinner, purchasing tickets, paying bills, making reservations, etc., and even more, etc.!
What does this mean for service-related industries? Should this be a priority when developing or enhancing one’s customer service strategy? When your customer chooses to communicate in a certain manner and your competition chooses to accommodate the customer’s desire to make life easier via technology, the answer is pretty obvious.
Either get on board or miss out on the opportunity for increased revenues. How can one provide a great customer experience to the mobile customer? Let’s look at a few ways to get this done.
Determine what’s important to the mobile customer.
While it’s important to be “mobile friendly”, (your website is mobile friendly right?) it’s also important to know what’s important to your mobile customer. Mobile customers are busy people and really want to do everything from their mobile devices.
They want the ability to visit your website, conduct business, and move on – while waiting at the traffic light! This means that your website should first of all be built for speed. How many clicks to complete a transaction? How many clicks to locate items? How does the site look on their smartphone screen? Is there a “click-to-call button” available on your mobile site? Are they able to find your locations and open hours? Can they email you from your mobile site? All of these are important to your mobile customer.
Get an app.
Another way to deliver a great mobile customer experience is to provide a downloadable mobile app. Doing so creates an avenue for two-way communication. A mobile app allows you to be proactive in having the ability to “push” information to your customer. You can advise your customer of future events, sales, changes, or delays.
Your customer should also be able to contact you as well via your mobile app. Let’s say your customer is running late for an appointment or reservation – can they communicate this information to you through your mobile app? Now some might say “Why not just make a phone call in this example.” I would say it doesn’t have to make sense – it’s what the customer prefers to do.
If your competitors are providing an avenue for customers to communicate in their preferred manner and you’re not, you run the risk of your customers becoming your competitors’ customers.
Pay attention to your data.
Your mobile customer’s activity should provide some great data for you to establish usage patterns. What percentage of your website visitors do so via their mobile devices? What percentage of customers who downloaded your mobile app actually utilize it? What percentage of mobile visitors actually make a purchase from your website? What percentage of customers making reservations do so from a mobile device? When pushing out sales specials to your mobile app users, what percentage take advantage of your offer? What percentage of total sales are attributable to mobile customers? These are some questions that can assist you in determining the effectiveness of your mobile strategy.
The answers will surely create more questions – How can we get more customers who downloaded the app to actually utilize it? Does our advertisement wording incentivize our mobile customers to make a purchase? Do we have all of the pertinent information available to our mobile customers? The answers will certainly identify areas of opportunity in the quest to create a great mobile customer experience.
The mobile customer is not one to tolerate a slow or non-existent mobile customer strategy. Make sure yours is running on all cylinders by Determining What’s Important to the Mobile Customer, Providing A Downloadable Mobile App and Paying Attention to Your Data.