Today’s
world is moving at a lightning speed. No, I’m not talking about earth’s
rotation speed about its own axis or its orbital speed around the sun. I’m
essentially talking about fast changing lifestyles of people & shorter
product lifecycles. In today’s India, travelling & movement of people
within the country has increased to a large extent. Moreover, people just do
not want to lose contact while travelling. The need to stay connected
(especially in young & middle-aged generation) is starting to become one of
the basic needs of humans. Add to that busy schedules, online payment services
& you’ve uncovered a new business domain – ‘Mobility’.
One
industry was bound to make a huge leap of progress due to this need of mobility
– the E-commerce industry. Naturally, it
has recorded really big numbers in terms of growth. ( 88% y-o-y growth in the
last year, details as per economic times report - http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/indias-e-commerce-market-rose-88-in-2013-survey/articleshow/28144076.cms ) E-commerce growth can be
attributed to a few other reasons too, viz., standardized products (consumers
do not need to check the product quality physically, since most product
categories have adopted standardized manufacturing) & online payment
services (there are so many alternatives to cash payments available today).
How
exactly has this become possible? Let us have a glance at technological
breakthroughs achieved by mankind in the last 2 decades: First one is wireless
communication. Whether you are using GSM/CDMA with 3G,4G connectivity, GPRS, Bluetooth,
ZigBee, Wi-Fi; you are using some form of wireless communication. Admittedly,
some of these technologies have been invented far back than last 2 decades, but
they have really become power friendly & consumer-friendly in the last 2
decades. Second one is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has enabled such
miniaturization of almost all devices that it is astonishing to believe the improvement
in sizes & processing powers of devices just 15 years ago.
Businesses
of course have to keep up with technological & lifestyle changes &
hence companies have been focusing more & more in the area of Mobility. Mobility
can be deployed by organizations in 2 ways – Enterprise Mobility (as a
supporting platform to accommodate BYOD style of working [Bring-Your-Own-Device])
& leveraging Mobility as a tool to engage customers. A few mobility
solutions are already available in the market. However, most of them cater the
need of enterprise mobility. It would be really interesting to see the
innovative solutions in the area of customer engagement & customer loyalty.
Today
most of the companies have a hard time connecting to their consumers. This is
particularly applicable for FMCG industries, where volume of sales is so high
that currently companies don’t even bother recording the names of even the frequent
customers. Mobility technologies could be a great enabler to actually link
organizations to their customers. Here
are some of the ways through which businesses can leverage mobility to engage
with their customers: 1) CRM 2) Transaction Tracking 3) Targeted Advertising
4) Incentivization
First
one is CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Mobile CRM stands to be a great
way for a company to engage with its customers. It provides tremendous amount
of time & place flexibility to the customer. They don’t have to stand in
long queues or wait for an access to PCs to interact with the company. Some
part of this was already being provided through IVRs, but now smartphones &
Internet connectivity have really brought the Customer Helpdesk in the palm of
consumer’s hand. Companies can do Servicing & Troubleshooting as well as
solicit Instant Feedbacks through mobility. Second way is Transaction Tracking.
Customers don’t do all their transactions at a specific outlet or on the PC.
Through mobile devices, most of their transactions can be recorded. Mobile devices present businesses with a
24x7x365 touchpoint to reach their consumers. Next step in customer mobility is
Targeted Advertising. If transactions of customers are recorded, we can draw
out patterns & based on those trends targeted advertising can be sent to
the customers. Furthermore, since a company gains lot of info about the buying
patterns of a consumer, accurate & more importantly instant incentivization
can also be done through mobility.
Thus businesses exploring the terrain of consumer mobility
stand to gain a lot from it. Organizations however, must re-think their
approach & attitude about the mobile computing world. Some tips can be
found here – http://bit.ly/1gGJ4Fb. Proper implementation of
customer mobility solutions can really go a long way for companies in creating
long-term & fruitful engagement with their customers.
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