Don’t garnish, but infuse: Your

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By letting mobility in, you are opening the door to more customer interaction moments of truth

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The penetration of Mobile internet in India has seen dramatic growth in
recent years and is likely to cross 1 billion connections before 2016. Last
year, the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) estimated that
the value of digital payments in India would touch $20 billion. It is
impossible to ignore the repercussions of these indicators for businesses on
the need to better engage and serve new-age customers.
The Mobile Phone has become invaluable
The first text message I received from my bank was around a decade ago.
That must be true for you too. Back then, text message notifications were an
add-on service that customers needed to register for. Once you registered,
text alerts were sent for every banking transaction made.
These alerts were available for transactions on credit cards, debit cards and
in general any banking transaction triggered on your account. The mobile
phone was not yet smart then and notifications via SMS were typically one-
way and were primarily introduced to prevent fraudulent activity. Of
course, there was a little more—I could compose a text message by typing
‘BALANCE’ and send it to a specific number to know my account balance
via SMS.
I still receive these alerts, but the utility of the phone for my financial
transactions has changed dramatically. I now have an app the bank has
given me, from which I can do a host of things—check balances, look up
nearest ATMs, transfer money, initiate service requests, make utility
payments and so on.
Starting off as a passive platform around a decade ago, and serving very
well as one-way alerts, the variety of things that can be done with
smartphones today is incredible. Notably, we are no longer passive
recipients of information from the bank. We are now able to conduct real
transactions that we traditionally could only do at a branch or over a
desktop browser from home or office.
Change in Lifestyle
What started off as a passive platform for one-way alerts, the things you can
do with a mobile phone today are innumerable. Whether it is finding a
restaurant and getting driving directions to that place, or ordering a specific
cuisine right from home, to managing travel and holidays, or, as I recently
discovered, managing the service needs of your car, the smartphone has
really become invaluable today—and is increasingly being seen more as a
utility than just a fancy accessory.
In this shift, more transactions are conducted on the device and these have
really become two-way—data of some kind is being received and sent.
It is about engagement potential – not just the Device.
So, really there are two important implications of the way mobile is
impacting organisations—one is the change it is bringing on the delivery
side. The interfaces, the convenience, user experience etc., are all
dramatically improving and are allowing firms to enable and engage with
customers better and in radically new ways. In fact, mobile apps are a great
way to prompt customer self-service and even action to unlock new cross
and up-selling opportunities.
The second implication—which is probably more important, is that from a
single system generated alert that sends data (through text alerts) to a
mobile device, we are now increasing the number of points in
organisational processes where mobile devices are actively ‘in conversation
with’ your customer. As we pack more functionality on the app, we are
allowing a larger number of processes with touch points to mobile devices.
These touch points are no longer passive—they are points where two-way
communication is required and in many cases, points that are actually
triggering new actions, instructions, data exchange, events and entire
processes themselves.
The qualitative impact of your digital transformation programme is a result
of how well you deal with these two aspects.
The Need to Rethink Process
So the bottom-line is that we are no longer looking at mobile touch points
the way we viewed text alerts 10 years ago. Mobility cannot be adequately
leveraged by slapping on mobile extensions to old processes. We are really
not ‘garnishing’ our processes, but actually infusing ‘mobile’ into existing
processes.
The need to ‘infuse’ mobile is going to have a disruption effect of sorts on
your processes involved. Mobile will demand a different degree of
responsiveness from your existing processes. The old way of thinking of a
process and workflow has to be re-visited. Gaps in poorly-designed
business processes are likely to get exposed easier if they aren’t first re-
contextualised for your digital initiatives, and so we really are talking about
a definitive process transformation that dovetails into your mobility
initiatives.
It’s about the customer
By letting mobile in, you are opening the door to more customer interaction
moments of truth. There are innumerable instances where a single bad
customer experience has rippled across the internet causing significant
damage to brands and that can well happen to any brand, because there is
another very important ‘revolution’ called social networking with which the
mobile revolution is intricately intertwined.
They are both happening from the same device, and what connects the two
is merely a few flicks of the thumb.

Read more: http://forbesindia.com/blog/digital-navigator/dont-garnish-