Mobile is drastically changing consumers’ behaviors and expectations. Forrester calls this phenomenon the mobile mind shift: the expectation that I can get what I want in my immediate context and moments of need. While the mobile mind shift is global in nature, it’s most profound here in Asia Pacific (AP): By 2020, 4.3 billion people globally will have a mobile subscription and more than half of them will be in AP. Organizations must take advantage of this and catapult their business to new heights — or risk becoming irrelevant in the eyes of these technology-empowered customers.

Forrester has developed a framework to help eBusiness and channel strategy professionals prepare their organizations for the mobile mind shift that we call the IDEA framework. This is a systematic approach to developing mobile experiences for customers relevant to their context and entails:

  1. (I)dentifying mobile moments and their context. A mobile moment is any time a person pulls out a mobile device to get what s/he wants immediately, in context. To understand your customers’ mobile moments, identify their needs, motivations, and context. Forrester recommends using customer journey maps for this step.
  2. (D)esigning the mobile engagement. Use these results as an input when designing the mobile engagement. The design should match your business objectives and your customer’s motivation in each moment. The key is to incorporate contextual information into the design language of the app so that it is easy for your customers to interact with you in their mobile moments.
  3. (E)ngineering your platforms, processes, and people for mobile. To deploy and support your mobile experiences, you need to ensure that your back-end technology, relevant processes, and people are mobile-ready. This is where you will face the true cost of mobile; we estimate that I&O pros will spend nearly 80% of their budget on this step.
  4. (A)nalyzing results to monitor performance and optimize outcomes.You need performance and operational metrics to see how your app is behaving; business metrics to justify current and future investments; and customer and experience insights to improve the customer experience over time. All of these insights will help you modify the mobile engagement according to the shift in customer expectations over time.

 

Some firms in AP have already embraced the mobile mind shift and are reaping business and financial benefits. For instance, India-based Indiabulls Real Estate leveraged a tablet app to generate $2.5 million in additional revenue. Similarly, India-based ING Vysya bank’s mobile app propelled its mobile banking to new heights: Transaction value increased more than 10,000 times over and transaction volume by a factor of more than 2,200 — all within just 12 months. If you’d like to learn more about how you can use the IDEA framework to build mobile experiences for your customers, feel free to reach out to me.