Dynamic User Journeys For Mobile
Mobile users have different needs and priorities to web users, even when looking to accomplish the same end result. Thresholds and KPIs for a mobile journey may need to be set differently to those for a main website.
Mobile and tablet devices are the key touch points for online visitors now.
To differentiate this year it is imperative that retailers maximise the customer experience of mobile users.
An optimised store whether for mobile, web or in a physical location is all about meeting customer needs and protecting them from problems. Mobile user experience monitoring and measurement are crucial in this understanding. If you do not understand what your customers are experiencing you cannot understand what to improve, where to improve it and why it should be done.
Tribe’s award winning Mobile-App and Mobile Monitor, with its advanced mobile experience monitoring capabilities, is instrumental in ensuring consistent service performance and seamless user experience. Many testing services offer traditional User Journey methods which monitor a series of static, fixed in advance URLs, but with today’s dynamic mobile sites, it’s essential to choose a supporting testing approach such as thinkTRIBE’s Dynamic User Journey monitor, that looks live into the content of each page: and chooses only from links available there. If one of the products you sell disappears from your site when it goes out of stock, thinkTRIBE will never throw a false alarm, unlike a static URL approach which will, when the URL for that sold-out product is now no longer valid.
In particular the big growth in Android smart-phones, means that measuring the user experience 24/7 of your Android users, by Android Website Monitoring is becoming a must-have, to complement iPad Website Monitoring
Measuring customer experience cannot be done merely through monitoring traffic, sales or downloads, instead organisations need metrics from a “Do What the Customer Does” approach and use “automated mystery shopping” to understand the impact of performance on experience 24×7, using dynamic, random, mobile user journeys through the site or app to really duplicate a live mobile user experience.
Mobile journeys need to be understood and analysed in their own right, but also need to be viewed in the context of the different ways mobile is used as part of a multichannel interaction. This may mean a number different mobile user journeys that cover the goals of users who use mobile as a support function rather than as their primary interaction device: and also to measure specific platforms, whether Android website performance, or iPad etc.
In general traditional websites are still satisfying users more than mobile sites and apps from the same brand. In customer satisfaction research the average benchmark satisfaction score (out of 100) was 79 for websites and 67 for mobile experiences. However a few very large retailers like Apple (score 85, which is an unprecedented 2 points higher than its web score) and Amazon (score 84) buck this trend and show their recognition of the value of mobile and the importance they place on it .
With mobile still in its infancy in many ways, and developers and designers not having the wealth of experience and best practice to draw on, these findings are not surprising. However, users have no such patience and will not be taking such things into rational consideration when forming their attitudes to a brand based on experience – and that directly impacts the bottom line.
Unless the satisfaction gap between mobile and online is closed the effect on brand and bottom line will only become amplified over time as users expectations rise and larger sections of the population use mobile in their interactions. This pattern was seen in early days of eCommerce and should not need to be repeated, if Android user monitoring and other platforms too, are measured.
Defining Dynamic User Journeys For Mobile
Working closely with clients of all sizes thinkTRIBE developed the new Mobile website Monitoring service, a flexible system that enables full visibility of the real user website experience in real-time of mobile apps, mobile websites and services and can provide exactly the information organisations needs to ensure they are not losing sales, loyalty or customer engagement through the mobile channel. The technology builds on the existing flexible Application Synchronicity platform that underpins thinkTRIBE’s unique Dynamic User Journey monitor approach to Website Monitoring -and extends it, including Android mobile monitoring on a true Android platform, with specialised Android user journeys to be measured.
Users reported using their mobiles in the following ways which should be borne in mind when deciding on the key journeys to monitor in the beginning:
- 47% look up price information
- 34% compare products
- 27% look up product specs
- 25% view product reviews
- 20% purchase
- 12% find store info (location, opening hours etc)
The thinkTRIBE ethos of providing a “single point of truth” is centred around Mobile user experience monitoring. Allowing the information from monitoring everything, from server cycles to real in-browser experience to be used and understood at all levels of the organisation. This data is immediately actionable for support and operations teams, and also enables wider data driven decisions for purchasing and resource allocation. With numbers clearly showing the impact on User Journey performance, the financial justification for decisions and requests can be easily demonstrated – a matter of increasing importance as organisations depend on technological performance in all areas of the business.