How mobile apps affect and enhance the customer journey
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Customers have always been and still remain the most important people involved in any product. They’re the ones who have the most power, their happiness is the most critical to your success, and their displeasure is the single most likely thing to cause problems for you.
This is why it’s critical to make sure your customer is engaged and interested in your digital product at every stage of their journey, from when they first hear about it to when they become regular users.
None of this is particularly groundbreaking, but what is new and revolutionary are the methods by which customers are interacting with companies and the ways to optimize those methods to enhance the customer journey. Specifically 5.22 billion potential customers all use mobile phones and mobile apps (to varying degrees), and this is radically changing the ways in which companies can use these apps to change their customers’ journeys for the better.
How does the customer journey on mobile devices differ from traditional customer journeys?
Traditional customer journeys are predictable, linear, and individual. They begin, they peak, and they end (or ideally settle into loyal usage). Hear about product, go to store to buy product, use product, enjoy product. That world no longer exists, and companies that are willing to detach themselves from traditional customer journey models are destined to succeed faster than others.
Today, your customer might see you first on a digital touchpoint and ignore you only to find you again on another digital device and find you more intriguing. It’s neither predictable nor linear, but it does get back to what we said in the opening paragraph: it means the customer has the power and is in control of their own journey. What this means is that it’s no longer predictable, as every customer chooses how and where they most want to interact with brands, and it’s up to the brands to enhance the experience across the touchpoints chosen by their customer. And this is only further emphasized by the fact that customer experiences are now no longer individual: they’re public and shared. The customer journey you create isn’t just important for how one person reacts, but for how every potential customer around each of your customers is reacting along with them. Starbucks is a good example of this. A potential customer might walk past a physical store and ignore it before interacting with the brand online. Once customers interact with their app, however, they discover that they can order and pay all through the app. They can collect points and share on social media how many poi