In the first part of this two part blog we talked about the impact of the COVID pandemic on increasing digital adoption faster than anything before it, enabling older age groups who traditionally haven’t adopted digital before to start to interact with it on a first person basis for things like cashless payments and banking services.

Since the pandemic businesses who traditionally where slow to digitize their business have found that customers who were forced to go digital during the pandemic no longer want to go back to older more traditional marketing led offline / off mobile service provision.

This is an opportunity for ALL businesses and not just retailers to begin to digitize the customer lifecycle for their customers and go Mobile Centric.

How you do it matters though, you cant just use a spray and pray approach you have to have a strategy and the focus on your product propositions is critical. Make it easy for a customer to purchase multiple products from you, single logins and investment in analytics that focus on the customer journey are critical to how successful and how quickly you can see the benefits of a fully digitised customer lifecycle.

Leading companies are increasingly offering an interconnected set of services to their customers with clear examples over the past decade, Amazon, Tesco, Alibaba, Rakuten all showing fantastic revenues and growth as they control their own Ecosystems and use advanced analytics and big data methods to understand what their customers want before implementing these requirements over and across their own mobile first digital consumer journeys.

However, these are currently the exceptions to the rule as we still see many companies that try and replicate the successes of Amazon et al struggle because they don’t understand the right approach to capture maximum value from their own customer Eco System.

Eco Systems are complex, to really create an impactful strategy for your customers that combines the need to manage their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), enable an Omni-Channel approach with mobile at its centre and constantly assess Value Creation you need to work with a partner who can help you determine those elements and their fit within your specific ecosystem. 

Mobile Core Ecosystems are basically advanced digital workflow systems that centre on the connectivity and versatility of mobile devices and embrace mobile centric solutions in the customer value chain.

Digital Wallets, ecommerce apps, ride sharing platforms, AI and Chatbots, Voice, ID&V solutions are all examples of a mobile at its core digital customer ecosystem.  Mobile platforms are now the No.1 for online access and more businesses than ever are investing in mobile tech to build out their own core.

Building your customer journey for mobile first and understanding the challenges your customers face on their customer lifecycle with your business is critical to future success of your business as it can impact every part of the customer lifecycle from acquisition and onboarding to loyalty and rewards. The connective functions of mobile allow you to improve branding, create a better customer experience, increase revenue and encourage cross selling and third party integrations for added value sales.

When you begin to utilise mobile workflows to communicate with your customers, you instantly encourage faster responses and shorter but more regular communications with your users, this in turn creates lots of data on each of your customers and their specific journeys which you can feed back into the customer journey by adding these data streams to your existing analytics package and starting to tailor their individual journeys better to maximise CLV revenues.

Data is key to a successful Mobile Core Ecosystem and to get the most out of your data its critical that you utilise middleware to integrate third party tech providers and other partners that can begin sharing data to allow for greater understanding and effectiveness of big data capabilities in the customer journey.

All the data you pull from your middleware provider can then be accessed, managed and enhanced to give you one true view of your customers and how they interact with your brand.

Companies can capture value from many different sources including customer-funded new products and services, merchant-funded platform usage, and third-party-funded data monetization.

Ultimately, Consumers are looking for more end-to-end journeys across products and services, and organizations are looking to rapidly reinvent their value proposition for the “next normal” whilst cutting costs on the overall number of suppliers they work with in their value chain.  However, going after that opportunity requires strategic focus, and choosing the approach that best fits the organization, to unlock the full potential of an ecosystem strategy.

Most larger businesses have grown up with multiple different IT services and platforms, some of which will be silos and won’t speak to other areas of the business, data will be batch driven and not streamlined, real time implementation of data driven logic will be a dream not the reality and they may think that getting to a mobile centric ecosystem is difficult or nigh on impossible due to these types of challenges.

Here at Apadmi, we understand that each of our customers end users habits are different and we know how to manage the individual customer journey to generate interactions, key analytics and increase calls to action resulting in positive outcomes.  

Using our Apadmi Core, we can integrate your entire software estate, disparate sales systems, analytics providers, CRM etc.. harvest the data from each individual platform or service and send it back to you as part of a bigger data collective, giving you all your data in one place,  one view of all your customer interactions leading you to a better understanding of your customer personas.

Your enhanced data can be used to create advanced customer journey workflows, fully automated and agile responses to a particular set of circumstances and customer interactions to generate slicker sales, increase added value sales, encourage third party sign ups or subscriptions and plan the next wave of marketing communications to maintain and increase the customers lifetime value.

Utilise our Engage module within the Core to integrate chatbots, SMS, Coupons, Digital Gift Cards or choose from several marketing channels like Whats App as your medium of choice as part of your new advanced mobile first customer journeys.

Trigger Digital Vouchers and Rewards outside of the mobile app journey to encourage more sign ups and then push the user a Digital Gift Card as a reward when they do.

One core, many integrations, simple and secure saving you time, money and resource and giving advanced one view analytics to help you understand your customers better.

Good Luck on your Mobile First Journey

The UC Expert