Would you be more upset if you left home without your wallet, or without your smartphone?
According to a JP Morgan Chase survey, two out of five U.S. consumers would leave their physical wallets at home if they used a digital wallet. Moreover, says the banking giant, the mobile phone has become the most prized possession of consumers.
This growing, always-on connectivity provides businesses with great potential to capture insights about customers and workers. And the onus is on IT to figure out how to ensure that the mobile expectations of the business can be realized.
That’s a lot easier to say than it is to accomplish. Business computer use has largely focused on improving processes and increasing automation, with customer and end-user satisfaction often more of a “nice to have” than a fundamental requirement.
That’s changing rapidly. An Accenture study found that customer satisfaction tops the list of business priorities – ahead of growing revenue – and is a main driver behind digital transformation ambitions.
Increasingly, the mobile device is being viewed as the key to monitoring and improving user satisfaction. The Altimeter Group defined digital transformation as “The realignment of, or new investment in technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle.” And those touchpoints are increasingly of the mobile variety.
The majority of adults have their smartphones within arm’s reach 24/7, and the average person looks at their phone 150 times per day, noted IBM executive Bevin Maguire. “As smartphones evolved, many IT departments let their mobile strategy grow organically. Now CIOs use a mobile-first approach to IT.”
Mobile, along with cloud, is crucial to acquiring and distributing the data required for analytics to inform CRM-based decisions.
A Forrester report available from IBM says that a great mobile app experience requires knowing the customer, including where they are and what they need in the moment. That requires collecting, analyzing, and acting upon vast amounts of data. “In a virtuous circle, additional data collected feeds back into the next experience to improve the next mobile moment, and so on,” Forrester asserts.
But improving customer satisfaction first requires empowering employees to better serve those customers. That means giving those employees mobile access to actionable insights.
Some keys to charting your company’s mobile-first strategy:
- Ensure the infrastructure is able to support the additional mobile capacity demands
- Determine how devices will be issued and managed, preferably using a Mobile Device Management solution
- Design a plan to put security controls in place to secure mobile access and usage
- Figure out how to design your entire mobile infrastructure, conduct the configuration and implementation, and then roll it out
Connection’s Mobility Practice experts can help you extend on-premises IT infrastructures to the mobile experience by ensuring the necessary network infrastructure is in place and securing the data on each device to prohibit unnecessary or unacceptable risk to your organization.
