Capturing the Mobile Moment

If your company’s enterprise mobile efforts are primarily focused on deploying devices and writing policies, you may be losing a definitive battle in the war to win, serve and retain customers, employees and partners.

To wit, we see competitive advantage being successfully realized by business leaders that focus on identifying and leveraging what Forrester Research calls “mobile moments”.  

Prominent success stories like Uber, founded in 2009 and now estimated at worth more than $50B USD, illustrate how responding to a customer’s moment of need with a tailored mobile experience creates significant value.

Mobile Moments

Most of us are familiar with the term “customer journey”—a series of increasingly complex touch points and interactions between a business and its customers, partners and employees.  

Mobile moments are points in time and space along the customer journey when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants in the context of that immediate want.

Here’s a simple example in a familiar consumer retail context (more examples):

Mobile Moment	Context	Action in App
Where’s the nearest location?	Nearby, in a car, walking	Locate nearby locations
Can I get a free drink?	Waiting in line	Check rewards balance
Can I pay using my app?	Waiting in line	Check available balance
Pay for my drink/food	At checkout	Use rewards or scan to pay

From an enterprise perspective, it’s important to realize that mobile moments aren’t limited to customer-facing interactions—employees and partners experience many mobile moments, too.  Typically, these mobile moments surface when employees need to consume information, communicate or share information, perform a transaction, or create something.  

In short, companies need to enable employees and partners to make the most of their interactions with customers and colleagues, and take direct action to get things done regardless of location.

Micro Moments

Because opportunities to take advantage of mobile moments have been available for several years now, consumers’ expectations for immediacy, simplicity and context-based relevancy have increased.  Alongside rising expectations, advances in technology such as wearables, iBeacons, analytics, connected products, sensors, interactive icons and notifications have given rise to the “micro moment”.

What is a micro moment?  A micro moment is a mobile moment that requires only a glance to identify and delivers quick information that it can either be consumed or acted on immediately.  Information may be a text, sound, notification, vibration, or icon change that proactively anticipates a need based on user’s context or preferences.

Examples of micro moments include being alerted to a stolen credit card, delayed flight, price change, sports score or bill due.  More complex examples intelligently examine several services to create new information.  For example, a business contact with whom you’ve been exchanging email regarding a meeting is determined to be nearby and your calendar has an open slot—a notification is triggered for you to take action and send an invitation.  (Additional examples of micro moments from marketing and enterprise productivity perspectives.)

Leveraging Mobile Moments is a Challenge

For established businesses identifying mobile moments and strategically leveraging them to create or enhance value can be a real challenge.  Forrester Research reports that:

• Less than half of digital business professionals surveyed have even identified the unique needs of customers on the go
• Only 28% use context to deliver relevant services or to streamline and personalize the delivery of their mobile content and services
• More than a third used mobile apps and websites as scaled-down versions of the corporate website

Clearly, many companies are grappling with engaging mobile customers effectively in their mobile moments, whether they be consumers, partners or employees.  Why?  There are a wide range of inertial factors from significant business process change requiring a mobile mind shift to technical architecture limitations.  

In short, a successful effort to engage mobile users in their mobile moments will require new, innovative approaches to all aspects of your business.

Where to Start?

Begin with creating a strategic plan to assess business opportunities to leverage mobile moments:

• Identify, organize and prioritize business mobile moment opportunities based on user needs, value, complexity and ability to execute
• Build an integrated roadmap with client product owners and stakeholders, including features, supporting/shared technologies, and dependencies for prioritized initiatives that lays out a plan for product development for near (~1 year) and long-term (~2+ years)
• Assist clients in identifying KPIs and success scenarios to ensure that the right approach is taken to realize objectives
• Envision and develop proof of concept for target near-term initiatives that richly illustrate key interactions and may be used to socialize a very tangible representation of product value

The Right Moment for Enterprise Mobility is Now

One of the toughest elements in mobility for many enterprises to understand and internalize is that mobility is not a destination…it is a journey.

The mobile ecosystem (devices, OS's, development frameworks, etc.) is changing so rapidly that enterprises waiting for the “right time” to jump into mobility will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Get a good partner to help you, get a strategic plan based upon your business’s mobile moments and get going on your own mobile journey.