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8/31/2012 Shivangi Trivedi

While the globe grapples with uncertain economic realities, mobile appears to be gold.

obility isn't just about technology and gadgets. It's a global shift in how we do business. These days, consumers are in the driver's seat. They expect faster delivery, more-efficient transactions, and richer customer experiencesonline and off. Collectively, they are the catalysts for organizations to invest time and

resources in mobility. Consumers are already enveloped in a blizzard of mobile experiments, whether they know it or not. This gadget loved by the people is today forcing giants like face book, Amazon to build their own mobile devices. State-of-the-art mobile technology has evolved from pagers to multifunctional smart-phones and tablets. Mobility means information, convenience and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screens and devices which trumps mobile. Mobile is the nuts, bolts and infrastructure while mobility is the context which determines if it all works well or not. Earlier, mobile phones were typical large handsets with limited functions mainly used to make phone calls. Then advancements such as improved battery and reduction in size with new capability of short message service (SMS) stormed the world, followed by launch of Blackberry, iPhone, and smartphones which captured publics attention by combining mobile communications with computing capabilities. The future says that No Robots, automated devices with use of mobile technology will communicate without human interaction. These recently launched "consumerised" apps and devices provide users with an intuitive and compelling experience, which increases the overall acceptance of available software and hardware resources provided to the user. The new solutions are almost an exact opposite of traditional systems, which even though efficient, mostly featured a slow, complex and often monotonous interface. As the old interfaces did not provide a compelling user experience, it was only natural that the new consumer-friendly apps were easily accepted by users over the enterprise mobility apps and devices, which were available earlier. The major benefits from a user perspective of these new apps are the reduction of monotony and complexity in carrying out enterprise-related tasks. From the perspective of an enterprise, the benefits include further improvement of organization-wide productivity- a cornerstone of introducing mobility solutions for an enterprise. Improve our understanding of the nuances of mobility and mobile behaviors before we ramp up our investment in mobile. Resist the

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temptation to rely too much on a guru; hiring a guru will only take our organization so far. Many of the organizations who brought in "social media gurus" learned this lesson the hard way. Firstly, a single individual cannot scale. However, if the organization is willing to put real teeth behind their mobile efforts, a single smart person can help form a center of excellence. Establishing a center of excellence that puts mobility at the core, and integrates it with other business initiatives, can get a business thinking about mobile more strategically. Secondly, realize that going mobile is not the same thing as having an app. In fact, avoid the temptation to "app everything." A lot of content whether video or text-based can easily be optimized for mobile consumption. Popular apps such as Flip board or Pulse point to a future of consumer "appgregation" using one app to aggregate many sources of content. Instead of creating a whole host of apps that few are likely to download, invest in making your "digital ecosystem" more mobile-friendly. Lastly, don't put mobile tactics in front of strategy. In the early days of the web, every site seemed to have an animated GIF or a clunky site-counter. In the early days of social, companies spent millions on costly Face book apps with cute gimmicks but no real utility or sharing value. Today, companies are scrambling to come up with something "mobile" whether or not it makes sense for their long-term business goals, and whether or not users will actually want it. The outcome is the same in across all of these examples: a low number of visits/installs/downloads and ho-hum business results. Tomorrow's winners of today's mobile gold rush will boast significant (and sustainable) usage numbers due to the value of their content, whether it's sheer utility or impossible-to-ignore entertainment value. Today's mobile realities are stark. Competition is fierce and users are demanding. If a company wants to put out a fitness app, its competing not just with Nike Fuel Band or Run Keeper, but with dozens of other apps put out by scrappy start-ups. Before doubling down on mobile, any business should first ask themselves if they really understand mobility as a behavior and lifestyle, followed by tough questions about the role mobile plays in their business. From there, a strategy for mobile, built on an understanding of mobility, can take root.

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With the explosive growth of mobile applications comes an obvious question: How will this technology affect global businesses? Undoubtedly, it will impact both internal operations and traditional business-to-consumer relationships:

Mobilizing Employees It is easy to identify the benefits of a mobile workforce. Both worker efficiency and effectiveness improve as employees are able to quickly execute basic tasks such as filing time reports and travel expenses from their phones. And data on the go can empower employees in the field with fast access to information from real-time shipping status to the latest sales figures.

Creating New Consumer Channels Brick-and-mortar stores and, more recently, retail Web sites have established a consistent brand experience for consumers. But the retail paradigm is transforming as customers can now purchase products directly from their mobile devices as well. Number of developing trends that will redefine the consumer experience, such as: Greater use of location-based services and augmented reality

Imagine a business owner using mobile technology to push targeted messages to shoppers passing by the store. Its quite possible with location- based services that use the global positioning system (GPS) and wireless-network technology to send location-relevant information to mobile devices. Augmented reality applications overlay displays of real world objects with digital information. Point the camera on your mobile phone at a street corner and see information about nearby restaurants, banks, or stores. Yelps Monocle app provides this type of functionality to users of the Apple iPhone. Increased price transparency

In the past, businesses could rely on strong brand recognition or an enticing promotion to attract customers. Once shoppers were inside the door, retailers could leverage a flair for merchandising
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or superior customer service to close sales and drive up selling. Because getting the customer physically in front of the product is no longer enough to ensure a sale, price transparency threatens to erode these traditional competitive advantages. Mobile applications such as Red Laser, Shop Savvy, and The Find enable customers to research prices from any location. A Smartphone-equipped shopper can examine the product at one location, use the phone to compare prices from multiple vendors, and then purchase the product at another retailers Web site or mobile application. With increased price transparency comes the potential for dynamic competitive pricing. More than ever, retailers will need to focus on operational efficiency to protect their bottom line. Using mobile devices like cash

Mobile devices could replace the wallet altogether as near field communication (NFC) standards make contactless payment technology interoperable with smart phones. NFC is an evolution of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) smart tags seen in the last decade on transit fare cards and contactless payment systems such as MasterCard Pay Pass and Visa pay Wave. Used in Japan since 2006, NFC-enabled mobile phones are becoming the default payment method in that country for transactions such as paying for parking fees, train fares, and vending machine items. Google has added NFC support to the Android operating system, and Samsung debuted NFCenabled hardware with the recently unveiled Wave 578 Smartphone. Marketing with mobile coupons

Recently, 70% of retailers surveyed said that within the next two years they plan to offer scannable coupons that consumers can access from their mobile devices. In-store redemption, however, will require optical scanning devices that currently have only a 2% penetration rate.5 to help ensure customer retention; retailers must carefully consider the interaction between mobile communications and their in-store technology. Increasingly, mobile devices must be viewed as viable alternatives to the current Internet and brick-and-mortar channels. The retailer of the near future will have to monitor customer preferences from multiple data sources to deliver highly targeted offerings at the right price. Transactions made from mobile devices will increase the consumers digital footprint and drive greater multichannel communication between businesses and their customers.
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Companies in many corners of the consumer world are trying some bold moves, making some big investments, and seeing substantial results. For instance: Kraft Foods has created its iFood Assistant app, a little software application that lets users email coupons, print those coupons, or add them to a store savings card; share recipes via Face book; access recipes; and scan bar codes to gain product information or build a shopping list. Similarly, Whole Foods provides a website optimized for mobile devices that provides store information, store specials, recipes, and mobile coupons. A leading domestic clothing retailer does not want the channel to become the barrier to a great customer experience, so its employing a strategy of common experience no matter where customers buyonline or off. As a result, everything is interoperable: clothes bought online can be returned to a store and vice versa, and all loyalty points and coupons are usable via any channel. Amazon.com provides mobile experiences that are fluid extensions of what users find when they go to a companys traditional Web site. Shoppers who interact with Amazon on their smart phones and tablets always find the same features, sections, buttons, and tabs theyve become used to from their Amazon.com experience on their PCs. In short, they get a consistent brand experience. Ralph Lauren has become a big user of QR codes to drive sales through mobile-friendly store windows and mobile websites. QR codes are those black-and-white squiggles in a box intended to connect the offline world to the online world. In early 2012, the company launched a new site, optimized for the typical mobile phones screen size and processing power. The site includes content such as Laurens branded magazine, video clips, and a style guide featuring recent campaign images. The idea is to give userspotential customers a richly entertaining and engaging experience. Even big banks are getting in on the action. Theres no shortage of activity in the world of mobile payments. Envisioned and debated at least a decade ago, using a phone to pay for goods and services is starting to become real. There are at least six areas where mobile can seriously enrich and strengthen interactions with consumers. The areas involve technology-enabled capabilities and practices that companies are using todayand, as a result, are changing the ways consumers engage in the marketplace. 1. Location-based services. Knowing where a user isin terms of physical environment represents a major insight. It enables companies to deliver services and offers to a customer based on the customers context at the moment. Imagine a scenario in which a shopper scans a QR code on a coat in a store, and the app on the shoppers phone (a) tells
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what other colors the same coat is available in at other stores, (b) captures opinions from the shoppers friends about the coat, and (c) sends an alert showing the shoppers available credit balance with that store. Thats participation marketing in action. 2. Place-space convergence. Increasingly, we humans are living dual existences: the first existence consists of our long-understood, regular lives in the physical world, and the second is what were coming to understand as our lives in the virtual worldreferred to by some as living up in the cloud. Leading thinkers are starting to envision that our actions in that parallel, virtual world often have their own character and may in fact demonstrate different personality attributes. The unique thing about mobile technology is that it can live in both worldsand thereby allow us to live in both as wellthus serving to weave the fabric of the two planes together. Although explicit manifestations such as proximity detection or the use of augmented reality to overlay data into any situation are becoming more commonplace, a much deeper convergence of the physical and virtual worlds likely lie ahead. In the future, the mobile device will fuse those worlds together ever more intricately to create more information-rich environments that facilitate increasingly diverse commerce, collaboration, and entertainment opportunities. 3. The Omni-channel experience. Consumers are interacting with the same organizations but through many different channels: smart phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs, as well as, yes, call centers and brick-and-mortar stores. So its important that their experiences as consumers be consistent. Only then can a company ensure that its brand is not being devalued because, say, the look and feel of its mobile Web page is markedly different from what users get at the companys traditional website. The experience must also be consistent over timeat all customer touch points: from rich presale experiences to satisfying post sale experiences. The key objective is to serve the same no matter the channel. The Omni-channel paradigm truly enables the customer to choose how they wish to engage with a brand without diminishing the experience because of the channel. 4. Game-vertising. Living some of the aspects of our lives as a game, or even inside a game as millions of World of Warcraft users can attest, can indisputably make things more fun. Expansion of game-inspired marketing via the mobile channel leads to a highly engaged consumer. So when teenagers use their Galaxy S tablets to download and
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play Grand Theft Auto III, theyll be very receptive to buying the music playing in the background from Amazon without leaving the game. 5. Digital connections across social networks. Companies are utilizing such services as Twitter for real-time social and business-to-consumer discourse, thereby both initiating one-to-one relationships with customers and providing alternative means for driving customer satisfaction. For example, insurance provider Progressive uses a social media strategy that calls for different tools for different channels. The insurer uses Twitter and Face book to respond to customer queries and enables customers to interact with online brand icons.15 Delta Airlines enables Face book users to book tickets on its site.16 And Citi uses social monitoring tools to analyze customer interactions across the entire Internet to identify areas for better customer service opportunities.17 Mobile devices enable new types of conversations between a brand and their customer. 6. Near-field communications (NFC). When touched to or swiped next to a reader unitat a supermarket checkout, sayan NFC-equipped device can launch a payment transaction. But NFC also can spur other forms of payment besides credit, enabling a shopper to pay, redeem coupons, or use loyalty points all in one touch. Such a solution can even authorize a physician to access a patients medical records. Many of the big wireless carriers, as well as other interested players such as Google are making big bets that NFC will be big business on mobile phones in the next few years. Just think when was the last time we found ourselves completely unplugged? We all experience minor interruptions in our connectivity: perhaps we travel through a dead zone and cannot use our mobile phone, or our vacation takes us to a locale with no Internet. Sure, it is important to step away from the grid to recharge our personal batteries but, the fact is, most people rely a great deal on all the tools of technology that keep us continually connected, both in business and personally. Technology has evolved a long way beyond simply logging on and reading static content. Todays tools are interactive, dynamic, and display astounding examples of creativity that lay behind their technological framework. Technology is poised to dramatically affect the world of global mobility in more ways than ever before imagined. Since the late 1990s, tools and information have migrated online. More

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recently, Web 2.0 capabilities have helped us connect and now mobility technology will solve many important issues with mobile employee and raise many more. Its easy to see that something big is happening. Today, mobile devicesiPhones, BlackBerrys, Samsung Galaxys, or Motorola Droidshave supplanted wristwatches as the most common objects that people carry. They've almost become like another part of the body. Indeed, many in the Millennial Generation consider their mobile phones to be more valuable possessions than their cars. In March 2012, the GSMA announced that, of Earths 7 billion people, more than 5.3 billion have cell phones. There are 3.6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide which means that, globally, there are now twice as many mobile accounts as there are bank accounts. The phenomenon is not just for the industrial world but emerging countries, where the first dollar is spent on food and the 2nd dollar is spent on communications. India and China account for 30% of total global subscribers. In developed countries like the United States, the mobile market has reached 105% saturation it is supersaturated with 40% of the subscribers having more than 3 devices. So why is the market potential for mobile services so enormous? Because todays mobile device isnt simply a phone anymore. It can be a tablet or a car or a biometric device on your armor one of the myriad other mobile devices that have some ability to sense and respond. The mobile device has become much more than a simple communications toolits an application platform and a sensing device too. Mobile allows for a richer, deeper, and more personal customer experience Mobility has enabled consumers to carry the Internet in their pocket, and with that power they're more informed, more mobile, less private, and more social than ever before. Businesses have a unique opportunity to stand outand pull ahead of their competitorsby discovering that mobile devices are not only tools to drive innovation but an ecosystem that can transform customer and employee experiences.

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