Struggling To Get Customers To Engage With Your Mobile App?

Olive Huang

Think about what’s on the home screen on your phone — probably emails, photos, weather, and your favorite social or messaging apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat or Instagram. It’s unlikely to be your utility company, insurer or local council.

Industry studies show that mobile users spend 70-80% of their time on their top three apps. This makes mobile apps a challenging engagement channel. Many brands have apps with low download rates or that are abandoned, forgotten or deleted.

Gartner believes that 90% of large enterprises will not achieve competitive advantages through their mobile strategies during the next three years, due to siloed investment in mobile customer engagement technologies. This is largely due to the lack of a holistic understanding of customers’ mobile needs and expectations.

It’s not just about the app. Consider also the role that a mobile-friendly website, progressive web apps, chatbots and mobile messaging might play in engaging with customers. Invest in an overall mobile strategy if you want to expand customer interactions and improve their overall experience.

Businesses must think through the support processes required to make their mobile app or device experience seductive and beneficial. If their apps don’t let customers do the things they need to, customers will be forced to go to a laptop or make a phone call.

To effectively engage customers via mobile devices, there are three steps you should take.

1. Design a complete engagement strategy

Team up with your business counterparts to design a complete mobile customer engagement strategy, which may cover uses ranging from mobile marketing to billing and customer service.

This will achieve the right balance in the frequency of each type of interaction (inbound, outbound or event-triggered) and the intensity of the engagement. Many organizations suffocate prospects with campaign-driven mobile interactions that encourage them to buy but ignore them after they become customers.

2. Observe customers, competitors, and other industries

Start with a detailed study of what’s considered best-in-class mobile customer experience in your geography and industry. Also be willing to learn what adjacent industries consider to be state of the art and customize your strategy.

An often overlooked step is to publicize and socialize both improvements and additions to the customer experience/capabilities. Call out the fun aspects and the utility of the application improvements simultaneously. Use alerts and notifications to re-engage customers that may be losing interest over time.

3. Treat mobile analytics as essential

Include in-app analytics to measure user engagement across messaging channels, mobile websites and applications. Not only will you find out how much time customers spend on your app and the number of visits on average, you will be able to gauge behavior based on live usage. Then you’ll know exactly what’s driving engagement, conversion, and retention.

If you have an app-centric strategy, your mobile app must run so well that there’s no need for customer service. A slow application, or one that is hard to read, navigate and link to the rest of a process, is already doomed to fail. Proper use of analytics will help to mitigate this risk.

The author is research vice president at Gartner