The Mobile Channel - Part 4 (Conclusion)

This last of The Mobile Channel posts should be sub-titled "how to be there when the shutter is open".  In the previous post (The Mobile Channel - Part 3), I talked about the rapidly diminishing amount of 'shutter-time' a customer will give to any form of contact, as a reaction to the veritable electronic information blizzard we all endure each and every day.

Customers interact with specific channels in specific places and at specific times when they are open to messages and information of a certain type.  Understanding this allows companies to engage customers in the channels and places they prefer. 

Winning businesses will ensure channels are not isolated from one another.  Winning strategies and investments will balance investments in channel capability against maximising the ability (ie; most channel-agile for lowest cost) for interactions to flow across channels according to customer choice.

In Precision Marketing, Five Ways to Make Better Marketing Investment Decisions, Kaplan and Siegal state:  "The customer, not the channel, must become the point of integration for marketing programs and spend decisions. By aligning the marketing organization around the customer, the entire organization understands (and works in a coordinated fashion) to create and execute the ideal experience, through the dominant channel pathways, when customers’ shutters are open and at moments when they are willing to act."

In our opinion, companies can and must take advantage of the mobile channel opportunity.  Not doing so poses a greater risk, as customers seek shelter from the digital storm by closing their shutters, possibly permanently in the case of some current companies they deal with.  Conversely, there is a great opportunity to retain current and win new customers by taking account of the above-stated impacts on customers. 

Implementing a mobile channel strategy must be part of a bigger plan to manage the overall customer experience and manage the costs of doing so. Maintaining the ideal experience/channel mix is a continuous exercise. It must accommodate emerging, sometimes unanticipated channels in a highly adaptive fashion that allows rapid re-focusing of activities and spends. 

The changes to make will depend on measurement of customer responses and the details of the specific activities they undertake. Measurements must clearly be taken in real-time, with statistical correlation and analysis to enable an understanding of the underlying trends within the totality of data involved in every interaction with every customer.  This is a holy grail industry leaders are pursuing now.  We recommend all companies engaging with large consumer markets should urgently be pursuing their own unique vision of this. 

To Summarise:

Companies should urgently establish a mobile channel.  This should be part of a broader, urgent strategic action plan to radically escalate customer experience management capabilities across all contact channels and mechanisms. 

Among the recommendations, deliverables and actions:

1.  Optimise agility across all current and new channels to maximise likelihood of engaging the customer in the channels and places they choose.

2. Avoid the creation of new organizational and technology stovepipes to implement channels and to manage and measure across all channels.  This will lead to unsustainable costs, unresponsive services and excessive delivery intervals for crucial capabilities.  Companies should streamline and align technology and organizations to maximise the customer's ability to control their contact channel choices in real-time.

3.  "The customer, not the channel, must become the point of integration for marketing programs and spend decisions."  Align the marketing organization around the customer as much as possible, rather than following past practices of aligning marketing organizations against channels and thereby indirectly to specific customer groups.

4. Implement real-time measurement and analytics processes to adjust and manipulate the channel mix and capabilities in response to detailed knowledge of customer behaviour on each and every interaction.

In a new series of posts I'll explain how ShrinkRay provides an immediate path forward, allowing companies to simply and easily deliver on the above recommendations.

Cheers,

Dave Dingle
Co-Founder, BoomBoat Inc.  

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