Mobile

At the recent EGR Live gaming event Jamie Barnett, Head of Gaming and Shilpi Dahele, Gaming Consultant shared a 16 step guide to establishing the optimum user experience on mobile. Their findings were based on what they have learnt to date from various projects delivered by Foviance and internal research. Here is a snapshot of what they discussed:

1. Develop a mobile strategy:  ‘Mobile’ is more than a buzz word. First, confirm exactly what your mobile users want. Undertake research with punters and players to help develop a clear and well informed strategy.

2. Develop a measurement framework: A measurement framework focused on ROI will enable you to apply resources in the right areas, based on what drives value for your business

3. Understand player/punter attitudes, expectations and behaviours: Do appropriate user research to identify attitudes, expectations and behaviours of players who use your mobile offering.  This will allow you to target relevant customers who are currently not a mobile user, as well as improve your product offering

 4. Understand motivations and triggers: Understand routine tasks by knowing what happens before, during and after the event. This is important so possible engagement can occur at the earliest and latest points of the process. 

5. Understand barriers and act against them: We found the strongest barrier to mobile betting was the fear of security. This can easily by alleviated by providing security features and visible clues to reassure the customer. Understanding all barriers to mobile betting and gaming will help you refine your offering and marketing strategies.

6. Evaluate/validate current mobile offering: As user experience professionals, we always advocate evaluating your proposition with real users to validate your offering. Understand what works, what doesn’t and what improvements from a users’ perspective should be made to the mobile site.

7. Evaluate competitor offerings: Understand what works well on competitor’s offerings and what doesn’t work well. Understand what tasks can be completed with ease and what tasks causes confusion. This will help you to get the best out of what they do, whilst improving where they fall down.

8. Develop consistency across platforms: Customers tend to get disappointed if  functionality is available on other platforms, and not on theirs. Our advice, offer the same functionality across all mobile products, therefore delivering a consistent customer experience.

9. Keep it simple and functional:  The most popular mobile betting sites are the ones that are both simple and functional. Simplify logins, limit registration to the minimum required fields and provide only relevant content to avoid unnecessary noise and time-consuming task completion.

10. Provide integrated support for ALL key tasks: As well as keeping the mobile offering simple and uncluttered, ensure there is still a level of support to enable users to complete all key tasks.

11. Provide feedback where connection failure occurs: Service failure is out of your control, but reassuring your user and being helpful remains in your control. At minimum provide an SMS alert to the user to confirm their bet has been processed.

12. Mobile should resemble the web version as close as possible: Keep the colour coding, terminology and navigation as closely aligned as possible. Customers tend to prefer familiarity to your brand and how your current website operates.

13. Target existing customers from other channels: Try including any of these initial steps to get people to use your mobile offering. Launch mobile-only offers and promotions, send bespoke email campaigns about mobile gaming or add a mobile CTA on the current site’s homepage.

14. Capitalise on the impulsive and social nature of mobile betting: Work on triggers, timing and message. A great way to do this is to send SMS alerts during important matches/races or placing adverts on typical resources and triggers.

15.Extend you CRM: Collect information and develop a profile on your punters, then alerts can be executed in a timely manner – great for impulsive betting where punters act fast and intuitively from an alert.

16. Keep one step ahead of your competition: Fully understand your customers, keep talking to them. Understand their immediate frustrations and expectations, be more customer centric and ideally build an 18 month strategy plan, using both customer feedback and your business requirements.

Jamie’s slides from his second EGR presentation: UX Measurement Strategy of Continuous Improvement

The Social Media & Mobile Engagement Directors Forum, hosted by the Customer Engagement Club and sponsored by Foviance will discuss: How to create strategies and operations for social media and mobile devices. Including the ways these can drive business performance and improve customer and employee engagement.

Richard Sedley, Commercial Director at Foviance will be a keynote speaker.

His presentation will include:

• Meeting the mobile and social challenge
• How media and mobile became such important channels for customer engagement
• Key issues facing organisations who wish to maximise their use of these channels
• Examples illustrating pitfalls and best practice.

To view Richard’s slides from the day.

Did you manage to attend the Social Media and Mobile Engagement Directors Forum, held on Thursday 3 March? If you couldn’t make it, not to worry, we’ve included a few videos from the day.

We spoke with Wade Burgess and Hugh Griffiths, both key speakers at the event, as well as Chris Haynes, from Eurostar, and Sarah Green, from RM Education about the current social media challenges their organisations are facing. Enjoy!

Wade Burgess, Director LinkedIn 

• A brief synopsis of Wade’s presentation at the Social Media and Mobile Engagement Directors Forum

Sarah Green , Customer Experience Consultant RM

• What have you taken from today’s conference on Social Media and Mobile Engagement?
• What are the social media challenges RM are currently facing, particularly being in Education?

Chris Haynes, Marketing Intelligence Manager Eurostar

• What social media challenges are Eurostar currently facing?
• Mobile is changing the way people engage with companies, how are you responding to that?

Hugh Griffiths, Director Digital Potential

• Observations in social media: Past, present and future.

Richard Sedley, our Commercial Director, opened the Social Media & Mobile Engagement Directors Forum on Thursday with a fantastic presentation on Customer Engagement.

With the use of the internet and Google, customers can easily search for the cheapest, quickest and most convenient products and services out there, all at a click of a button. As customer expectations increase, companies are now feeling the need to deliver more and more. For example, the task of marketing has become harder as we now operate in such a transparent environment.

This is why the opportunities that unfold in the mobile sector are becoming areas that need to be addressed. Mobile is not the dumb internet; it has become so much more than just a phone.

A snapshot of why the future of engagement is mobile:

• Our level of attachment: It is without a doubt and worryingly our most personal relationship. With 67% of people taking their phone to bed with them, what other device has the ability to disrupt us in our sleep?
• Always by our side: Allows us to self-manage, wakes us up, alerts us for the dentist and provides instant access to the best things out there. There is no such thing as ‘dead time’ anymore; we always have something to do on our phone.
• Puts you in touch with new people: In a way that is socially acceptable and with people you might not normally engage with.

Take a look at the full presentation below.

2011 will finally be the year of mobile: the array of smartphones available and other 3G/Wi-Fi devices is growing by the day, decent mobile broadband speeds are now widely provided, and access to the mobile internet has become affordable.
Read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of your Foviance newsletter.

This bumper edition looks back to the best of 2010 and makes a few predictions about 2011. In my own roundup I touch on some of the key themes Foviance and its customers have been focusing on recently – multi-channel experience, mobile usability, customer retention, social media, and the drip-effect from paper to digital ink.

Elsewhere in this final issue of the year, Carina looks back on the entertainment and insights we gained from World Usability Day 2010, Jamie looks forward to next year’s ICE gaming event, I talk more about the language of customer-centricity, and Neil points us all towards the latest multi-channel experience research from Foviance and Econsultancy.

If you enjoy this latest newsletter, you might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog page.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Have a great holiday.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Another year over, a new one just begun…

Communication key to World Usability Day fun

Speaking the language of customer centricity

Living and thriving in an experience economy

Gaming sector warms up for ICE 2011

In the last newsletter issue of the year, it has become a tradition to round up the events of the last twelve months as well as making a few predictions for the year ahead. It’s a useful process that provides an opportunity to take a step back from the business and evaluate how we have done and whether we are still on track. It is also an opportunity to test my assumptions about the market and to think about the trends we are seeing in our customers and whether we are ready to support them.

2010 seems to have been the year that mobile finally came of age, although I think a new term is needed – one that properly encapsulates what is really going on. Perhaps ‘new technology’ is a more inclusive way to think about it, as our work has shown that ‘mobile’ is too limited and remains lumbered with hand-held connotations. Now would be a good time to mention the iPad, and we certainly had fun with our iPad back in May, but I’m also thinking of the work we’ve done with utility companies around the use of smart-meters, and in the financial services sector with chip and pin.

2009 had witnessed a slowdown in the evolution of multi-channel customer experience due to the pressures of the recession and I had wondered whether it would receive greater attention in 2010. The good news for customers is that this certainly was the case, with plenty of research and events focussing heavily on multi-channel, and customers increasingly asking us about it. It is possible that a focus on customer retention spurred by the recession underlies this increased attention, but I also see a wider interest in customer centricity prevailing. The rise of social media has certainly had an influence here, and a professionalism of the discipline is starting to emerge.

Foviance’s own social media capability has greatly increased in 2010 with the arrival to the team of Guy Stephens and Richard Sedley.  Guy is expert at helping organisations leverage social media in their customer services departments and speaks and lectures widely on the subject. Richard is also extremely well known and even lectures for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, delivering its social media course. I fully expect that the Foviance social media proposition will evolve considerably next year, while in addition to customer service and social media strategy services we will also incorporate solid research and measurement.

So finally to 2011 and some predictions. Will it be the year the book and magazine dies? I wouldn’t go that far, but I think 2011, with the launch of various iPad lookalikes, will be the year when we start to work a little more paperless and make a mental leap from paper to digital ‘ink’. At least two of the magazines I carry in my bag each day are now available in iPad editions (although the subscription is for the printed version and the digital one comes free – when will they learn!). The ability to explore beyond the page is also exciting – I can certainly see myself commuting to work next December and not being surprised by all the people on the train and tube reading from handheld, digital devices.

Of course I will still be surprised if we arrive on time – some things technology seems unable to improve…

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

By Lis Shorten

It didn’t occur to me until recently that a blind person would even contemplate using an iPhone. After all, it’s a touchscreen interface that requires interaction between a finger and an onscreen image and lacks any sort of tactile or sensory feedback.

If I turn my phone off, then close my eyes and try to turn it back on, I fail at the first hurdle (slide to unlock). Even though I’ve turned my phone on hundreds, possibly thousands of times, with my eyes closed I never seem to get my thumb in the right place to accurately swipe the slider. Read more…