Crafting The Mobile Experience

This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The rapid proliferation of mobile has done more than just untether us. Sure, we no longer have to rough it to our office just to check email or to update a spreadsheet. But in reality, that isn’t really all that new. What is new is the importance of crafting a mobile experience for our customers, and that’s where smart brands are now focusing.

Let’s back up. It’s not a revelation that we spend an inordinate amount of time connected to our devices. Some 91% of us sleep within arm’s reach of our phone, while three quarters drag our precious digital devices into the restroom with us. We don’t leave home without our devices and there is rarely an instance when we don’t have them in hand or in a pocket. We are obsessed with being connected. In fact many of us are almost unable to function if we realize we’ve left, lost, or damaged a device, and the idea of running out of battery power has been known to bring on the shakes.

This trend toward mobility is captivating humans for sure but, for businesses looking to capitalize on the mobile trend, it’s about something more than just our collective obsession with being connected. What mobile is doing to transform life and business more than anything else are the experiences that it is allowing us to create and immerse ourselves in.

In a very short period of time, we’ve seen technology evolve at a breakneck pace. The shelf life of new apps and devices is shorter than ever before: they are only relevant for the short period of time that people are interested in and talking about them. For instance, I got an Apple Watch a few months ago and I’m already kind of bored with it, thinking about what’s next. We quickly forget about the tools that we were using yesterday because today something new came out and it has displaced what only moments ago seemed like the best thing ever. For the creators of those apps, tools and devices this presents a new challenge. That new challenge is an unwritten but critical business tenet of continuous innovation–because sitting on your laurels is the fastest way to go extinct. For the users, it’s a completely different scenario, for they have the power of experience.

Mobile now is about putting the power in the hands of the workforce, of the consumer to do everything they might need to do in the office, in the store, or in the field, without regard to their actual physical location. True mobility breaks down all of the barriers that once limited work from being done at night or off the VPN. Today’s businesses need expediency, convenience, and simplicity. Mobile provides that. We can run our tools from our CRM to our ERP to our BI, all from our mobile device. Even better? All the while, mobile allows us the ability to stay connected face-to-face and thought-to-thought to our team, to our customers, to our prospects, using the latest and greatest in collaboration and unified communication software.

The key, however, isn’t in the technology itself. Business doesn’t really care about complex cell towers, carrier agreements, chipsets and antennae; no matter how badly we want them to. Business now is about meeting strategic goals. More sales, more profit, happier customers, more productive (and happier) employees, greater innovation, and having the tools required to make all of these buzz-laden concepts a bottom line reality.

It may seem kind of overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. For businesses thinking mobile experience, make sure to keep just one thing in mind:

The success of mobility is rooted in experience. We choose the apps we choose because of the experiences that they allow us to create. We don’t want complex, we want things to just work on whatever device we happen to be using, riding on whatever network we happen to be using. If you can make that happen, if you can create that seamless experience for your customers, that’s all you need.

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photo credit: Samsung Galaxy S3 via photopin (license)