This Post is a continuation of The Mobile Channel posted on December 13, 2008.
Many leading companies struggle to manage new technology costs and fail to understand how the new technology changes the game. In this post, I'll present how these issues occur and explain a bit about how to avoid them. ShrinkRay is specifically designed to address these issues for companies establishing a mobile channel, as I will explain in later posts.
Consider how the emergence of the now ubiquitous web contact channel raises customer expectations. The implicit promise of a web channel is line ups and wait times go away; and customers will be able to serve themselves faster than a human can help them from the other end of a phone line or on the other side of a counter. And as web technology has improved in terms of speed and interactive capabilities, customer expectations have continuously escalated.
When some companies established their fixed web channels, costs spiraled as a result of unanticipated new requirements. Specifically, technology and organizational choices triggered high costs to achieve and maintain consistency with other channels in terms of branding, business process functionality and product offerings.
New organizational marketing and technology silos were often created to deal with the new channel. This often caused communications and alignment issues. Technology choices frequently required re-work of existing solutions to add new interfaces, to control and coordinate changes across channels and to allow consistent functionality to be delivered.
The intensity of these issues is that much higher for the mobile channel. There are literally dozens of significant mobile technology platforms (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile. Symbian, other vendor-specific J2ME platforms, ..), browsers (Opera, NetFront, Webkit, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer ...), each of these is as different from the other as Microsoft Windows and Apple/Unix are from each other. There are literally thousands of distinct devices with widely varying capabilities (screen sizes, keyboards, memory, network bandwidth, ...).
The cost management challenges of such a diverse technology range is obvious. Less obvious is game-changing nature of the instant gratification, always on, high function internet world we now live in. Your 'cliche' alarm may be going off, but please read on! The magnitude of the current changes is unprecedented. I suggest that grasping the implications and gaining business advantage from it while managing costs will determine a generation of business winners. These are the same issues that determined winners and losers when companies embraced the internet. Now the stakes are that much higher.
A few years ago marketing was a highly traditional game with 7 main contact mechanisms (print, direct mail, outdoor signage, radio, tv, point of sale, face-to-face, and telesales) and relatively slow turnaround times for interactions with customers. In many companies, distinct organizations and technology stacks were established to deal with the unique needs of each contact mechanism. Often, the contact channels became a proxy for the customer at the end of the channel. We've all seen this. Enterprise customers are served by a direct channel, possibly exclusively. The telesales channel served the mid-market and/or the consumer market exclusively. Web contact was restricted to satisfying inbound information requests and not segmented to any particular market. And so on.
This was the way of the world as companies implemented their web contact channels. We have seen how massively disruptive this was. Companies like Dell, Amazon, eBay and Google literally steamrolled their competition by getting it right.
And look how the game has changed in the last 24 months: The 7 contact mechanisms have morphed into a highly fragmented universe with unlimited mechanisms that straddle and blur the boundaries between the traditional channels. Examples of the new mechanisms include: pop-up messages, outbound email, blogs, SMS messaging, podcasts, gaming, realtime messaging, multimedia, video sharing and conferencing, proximity applications and social networking, (to name but a few). It follows there is a great potential for much greater disruption from the many new modes of contact currently emerging.
In the next post I'll explain how this impacts mobile strategy choices and in some later posts provide some thoughts on how businesses can use ShrinkRay to derive immediate value from the mobile channel.
Cheers,
Dave Dingle
Co-Founder, BoomBoat Inc.
Posted by: |