written by Kaushal Sarda
How mobile apps can transform every aspect of the customer life-cycle for a business
[This post was originally written for social media today and published on June 22. You can find the original article here]
The Need for a Transformation
For any business to make its customer relationship program truly successful requires them to have the following:
- A consistent set of policies/guidelines across all their touch-points to provide a repeatable and great customer experience
- Technology to enable businesses to engage with their customers in real time across the entire customer life-cycle
Most companies have invested in both and seen good results but have not been able to completely optimize the experience. I think this is not because lack of will / discipline to implement policies or lack of technology to engage with customers. The key issue has been that so far we never had devices which supported rich engagement with the customer. This is because, till recently we never really had a device which was affordable, pervasive, and had the ability to support rich engagements. All of that has really changed with the massive adoption of smart-phones, and the success of app marketplaces.
Hence, Businesses now have an opportunity to leverage these platforms and create/ use apps to provide the optimal customer experience. This article will dwell into various areas of the customer life-cycle where mobile apps are already having a transformational impact on the customer experience
The key areas where mobile are having an impact are
- Offers & Coupons
- Loyalty program management
- In-Store Foot Falls
- In-Store product availability
- Real time product review / comparison
- Point of Purchase
- Customer Self Service
Offers & Coupons
Physical coupons have been the standard way to market offers. However, these kind of coupons don’t support any kind of personalization, and customers have to maintain the coupons, take clippings, etc. With mobile apps business can now provide coupons based on location, past purchases, and in real-time.
Rutter’s a convenience store chain in Pennsylvania USA has created a mobile app that allows it users to get instant alerts about special promotions/deals available at their stores. The offer coupons are sent to the user through the app, and can be directly redeemed. The app also allows the user to leverage their loyalty card during purchases so that they can get points which would in turn earn them discounts on gasoline.
There are also some other consumer apps that allow merchants to publish and manage their offers & coupons. Two such apps are Cardagin, and Cardstar. Some of their salient features are as follows:
- Empower merchants to push the right offers to the right customers in real time via geo-targeting
- Provide simple tools for merchants to load offers, coupons and incentives
- Provide a deep level of customer analytics, enabling merchants to tailor marketing messages and promotions to mobile customers
- Help share customized merchant information to customers like contact information, store locators, etc
Loyalty Programs Management
Loyalty programs are used by businesses to encourage and reward brand loyalty. Businesses provide customers with loyalty cards to track purchases and reward them in case of repeat business. The issue with these physical cards is their limited utility, just like the coupons. Place Pop is a location sensitive mobile app which helps businesses to create a loyalty program to reward repeat customers. Some of the important features of this app are:
- Businesses can create a mobile loyalty card, customize its look, publish custom messaging, define card tiers
- Businesses can push personalized messages about offers/deals to the users based on their interests, purchases, and location
- Businesses also get access to user demographic through activity feeds, content shared; analytics on other locations visited, facebook demographics, etc
In-Store Foot Falls
To increase store foot falls, businesses need the ability to push location specific offers. Mobile apps like Placecast ShopAlert are able to do this using geo-fencing. Geo-fencing is technology that allows businesses to create a pre-defined, virtual spaces around a particular locations. Such apps can support marketing local offering to nearby customers resulting in increased in-store foot falls. Some of the key features of Placecast’s ShopAlert app that businesses can leverage are:
- Supports delivery of text / rich media messages tailored dynamically based on place, day, time, customer loyalty/ past purchases, etc
- Provision for location based qualitative and quantitative reports to aid in measuring the effectiveness of their marketing strategy
In-Store product availability
Most shopping expeditions are driven by need to find a particular product. Now with the use of mobile apps, businesses can make it simple for a consumer to find the availability of a product in a nearby store. This significantly reduces the unnecessary time a customer spends to locate a product. Mobile apps like JiWire Compass solve this issues by providing a service that helps customers locate the nearest retailer where product is available, detailed product information through catalogs, and provides a concierge service to reserve the product. The app has products from over 200,000 retailers and product manufacturers and offers more than 3 million unique products across the U.S.
Real time product review / comparison
The in-store shopping experience involves finding information about a product, associated customer reviews, and comparison with other products. A mobile app that can provide such capabilities will help retailers to improve the in-shop experience for their customers. Retailers can take inspiration from Google’s shopper app which comes with features like:
- Allows users to search for products through image capture, voice, and also supports scanning barcode of almost any product
- leverages Google product search to help users can find best prices, reviews, specs, etc
- Provides users with curation features to bookmark favorites and share particular product details through Facebook, Twitter, etc
Point of Purchase
The “point of purchase” is where so many customers lose valuable time of their shopping experience. Starbucks has tried to improve this by launching a mobile payment app. This app is part of a “touch to pay” system, where the app’s barcode communicates with the in-store scanner at the register to make the payment without the need of any physical card. Users can manage their funds, check card balance, add additional funds, review purchase history via the app. The app also supports additional benefits through discounts, rewards and special perks like a free drink on birthday or free wifi access. The app supports payments via various methods ( Visa, MasterCard, etc) and securely encrypts and transmits user credit card information using 256-bit SSL encryption.
Customer Self Service
Customer service is the part of the CRM process where businesses can create maximum good will with their customers. Any app that can help a customer to resolve his need independently without any hassles will surely result in a great experience and brand loyalty. Delta Airlines have used a mobile app to support customer self service and make flying with them more convenient and rewarding. The app helps the users to:
- Check-in for upcoming flights, download mobile boarding passes, select seats, and rebook canceled or misconnected flights
- Checking flight status, terminal information, upcoming flight schedules, airport information, weather, etc
- Manage sky miles balance, and convenience features for frequent travelers like “note your parking spot”
Summary
Businesses need to look at these examples to get a sense of the power that mobile apps have to offer. They are a great means to create enriching customers experiences across the customer life-cycle. I certainly think that the time has come for businesses to re-evaluate their customer engagement strategy across the life-cycle and look at how they could use mobile apps to make those processes more effective for the customer and profitable for their business.
You can find the presentation summarized below:
[As a matter of fact, Kuliza help companies build Mobile CRM and Mobile Loyalty apps as part of its ZaMobile Offerings. You can know more about our mobile app solutions on our company profile]
Image courtesy: techrepublic
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