Even though we already have a clear view on what the tendency must be for us, we still look around stunned by the constant debate in different markets regarding the convenience of adopting a corporate mobile-first strategy.
Sectors such as banking seem to have already made up their minds during the last year. The tendency is clear: move away from traditional offices and build products around the smartphone. Letting customers open a new account just with their ID and a smartphone was something inconceivable just a couple years ago. Nowadays most of the biggest players are working on that functionality if they don’t have it already built in their apps. I remember not long ago when I downloaded the app of a German virtual bank that would let me open my own account from it after a personal video conference through the same app. Easy as a pie. Minimum bureaucracy and what is more important, minimum customer acquisition costs. At least, I guess that’s what most competitors might have thought when they saw their app. But what I perceived was a lot more powerful from my point of view. My experience as a customer. Far better than with any other bank from the device I use more and more every day for all my daily banking operations. Damn! My old bank even charge me for transferring money from their mobile app while is free from the website. Well… lets better not talk about my old bank customer experience.
more than 90% of online traffic to smartphone configuration websites comes from mobile devices.
This was an example I still see often when I browse the web from my iPhone. A couple weeks ago an add in Instagram called my attention. It was a pretty good offer on a well know brand of sun glasses. Some might even say a native digital brand (if that applies to a company able to do things in such a manner). I decided to buy a couple of sun glasses for me and my wife. Something comfortable and cool for this time of the year that I might not even require such complement anyway. I opened the brand website, I selected the two models I wanted to buy, I introduced the promotional code and… surprise! A damn banner just came up with a friendly but inconvenient message. That banner blocked the button I needed to press to pay in the cart and there was no possible way to make it disappear. I even tried pulling the web so the button would come out from behind that box. Impossible. I tried and tried for about… lets be honest, 2 minutes, and then I decided I didn’t need the glasses anyway and move on to something else. Great customer experience. I never again tried to buy from that brand… in the last two weeks.
Our personal experience tell us that more than 90% of online traffic to smartphone configuration websites comes from mobile devices. Usually customers use the very same device they are trying to configure. That info is data every MVNO have with a basic website analytics. That’s the reason I’m amaze when I see so many websites o configuration guides that are not even responsive (and don’t get me started on PDF configuration guides). I’m not saying everyone has to adopt a mobile-first strategy… well, not everyone that is not a mobile services provider. Anyway, if you still don’t have a mobile-first strategy in place and you are a MVNO or a MNO, even if you are an Enabler, don’t serve information to your customers in a way they can not consume from the very device they hire you to be able to use. It’s a good thing they always can call the customer care center, after a terrible customer experience trying to use your website, to get some help. And don’t be surprised by the cost of those calls or the amount of them to ask basic questions or by the churn rate that seem to be such a stable parameter we have already assumed it can not be changed.
We design every service for MVNOs with a mobile-first strategy because we expect our customer customers to consume those services from their smartphones. Not only because they represent 52% of the world traffic, not because it grows every year, not even because our analytics tell us its more than 90% of our traffic. It’s just because for this market, customer mobile experience is where we are expected to excel.
Our wizards, our mobile-first smartphone guides and any other product for end mobile users are designed for mobile displays, then we use a responsive design to make it available for bigger displays, not the other way around. This way we ensure the smartphone will always display correctly the information we need users to get. Often they have to perform simple steps on their device to make everything work properly but a bad explanation or a lack of usability might make the process seem impossible for them and they always end up calling for support after a bad customer experience. We also monitor every single process step-by-step to improve affectivity avoiding any detected miss step, often solved by redesigning the interface.