Get Your Digital Kit Ready To Fix The Broken CX

In the utopian mobile consumer experience, everything is seamless and needs are anticipated. To achieve that, brands should focus on owning the process instead of the product.

In a recent investigation The Times newspaper found U.K. rail companies were overcharging millions of passengers due to the opacity of ticketing information, while British banks were recently ordered by the government to share data in order to improve the industrywide digital offering to customers.

These are two perfect, and high-profile, examples illustrating the broken customer experience found across many sectors today. Now, more than ever before, there is a need for brands to provide consumers with more transparency, dialogue, ease, and lifestyle support.

Digital—particularly mobile—is key to making this happen, and forward-thinking businesses are taking the lead in elevating the customer service experience to a new level. Either through acquisition (Volkswagen investing $300 million in taxi app GETT) or internal innovation (BBC, ITV, et al coming together to launch a subscription service), established brands are leveraging their expertise via technology to take on the digital age’s newcomers and beat them at their own game.

There is certainly a cruel irony here—the direction of travel is that the better brands become at utilising mobile to provide a frictionless customer experience, the less obvious they become to users.

From a technology perspective, the desire for awesome mobility (read awesome customer experience) means that, increasingly, we’ll need to rely on technologies such as bots and shared platforms, rather than on the stand-alone apps as in the past. But the potential shown by the likes of Google Maps, Apple Pay, and iBeacon technology means that it is all possible.

Own The Process, Not The Product

The utopian mobile customer experience is one where everything is seamless, where needs are anticipated, and the services are delivered before we’ve even thought about them. And as we march towards this promised land, ambitious brands should stop focusing on owning the product and, instead, own the process.

By using mobile to enhance customer experience, this is certainly possible, and the rewards, if you get it right, can be phenomenal—as Uber has shown.

The phrase “I’ll get an Uber” is indicative of the success of the brand in offering a peerless customer experience. The fact the car I ride in is run by a company called Uber should be utterly irrelevant to me, yet it’s their positioning of “getting an Uber,” rather than simply “getting a cab” (which happens to be an Uber), that is so important.

Transformational Shift

By leveraging the power of mobile technology, Uber has offered what feels like a transformational shift in urban transportation, yet, in reality, is not that much more sophisticated than the old-school call to the local cab office. Because it makes the process of getting a cab so seamless (and quick), the brand is judged less on the transport service it provides, and more on the experience of using that service.

What’s more, Uber is even tailoring its offering to local markets. For example, Copenhagen has UberBike (a car with a bike rack on the back—why not when you’re in a city where the primary mode of transport is the bike?). That people are so comfortable using that service is one of the reasons why I fully expect to be Ubering lunch at least once a week from now on thanks to the launch of UberEATS.

The fact that consumer expectations in the digital age mean everyone is competing on a level playing field should be seen by all brands as an opportunity to take the lead in offering the ultimate in customer experience.

Brand Visibility Versus Customer Utility

Smart CMOs will be meeting with their digital, product, and marketing teams to assess where their mobile offering sits, both on its own and within the market as a whole, and looking for opportunities to better integrate it with emerging technologies and platforms. And when doing so, when the decision point of brand visibility vs customer utility comes up, they will go for utility every time.

Do you need that fancy animated brand logo? Not if it means the user has to scroll down further in order to complete an execution. Do you release a new version of the app that spent 10 weeks in the iTunes top 20 in 2014? Not if a simple chatbot integrated with Facebook or Twitter can do the job better.

Taking it back to Uber, why are some minicab firms now investing in installing credit card terminals in cars when customer expectation is now that you get in and out of the car without worrying about payment or a receipt?

The next generation of Hoovers, JCBs, Sellotapes, and Ubers will be the ones that leverage the potential of technologies such as mobile to make our lives better—but with the minimum of fuss. Turning a brand name into a verb through the medium of perfect customer experience is a rare but precious feat. If you don’t believe me … just Google it.