It is time for brands to start filling the “mobile gap”
Alex Heys of NowSendit on what brands still need to do to streamline the user experience for mobile customers.
Everyone knows that there is still a big gap in the customer experience when customers are interacting with brands on their mobiles.
Many well-known brands don’t have websites that are optimised for mobile, meaning that when a customer lands on their full-blown site on their mobile, navigation is tricky, aesthetics are skewed and it’s all a bit of a mess.
However, this disconnect between the mobile and non-mobile world goes far beyond slightly lazy marketing departments who haven’t yet got round to designing and building a mobile-optimised site.
It’s everywhere. For example, many mobile users don’t know how to transfer data to and from their phone: photos, videos or contacts. Equally, about half of people don’t use maps on their mobile because they don’t know how to or they find it fiddly.
Consider the wide variety of examples like this and you begin to get the impression that the orthodoxy that “everyone does everything on their phone these days” is not entirely true.
That being the case, one challenge for brands among the many they face in this fragmented digital world is to try and make their customers’ mobile experience make more sense.
This doesn’t simply mean stripping their website down for mobile users, or being a bit more cutting edge and starting to blur the boundaries between mobile sites and mobile apps.
It means more fully understanding how and when customers use their mobiles to access information about a business and when and how they use their desktop or laptop.
It means smoothing the journey from desktop site, to mobile site, to the customer physically walking through the door of the business.
It means providing information to customers in a format that can be used quickly and easily across devices. It means making connections for customers that have not previously been made or thought of – it is a daunting and exciting task.