At this year’s Digital Velocity, Kyle Brierley, Director of Product for Tealium focused on innovation for mobile and integrations, spoke about the importance of integrating mobile CX data into the larger customer data set to improve the overall customer experience.
The rise in mobile data usage continues, making it more important than ever to get started on this now. Worldwide, mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of five between 2019 and 2025, from 33EB per month to 164 EB per month. This is certainly driven by increasingly universal smartphone adoption across the globe. For many, mobile phones represent the main way of accessing the internet, but there are many permutations of mobile touchpoints beyond a browser on a smartphone.
According to Gartner,
“Despite the web browser continuing to serve as the most popular application touchpoint, mobile apps are on the rise. As immersive devices such as smartwatches and smartphones and voice-driven devices permeate the industry, the modes of interaction (type, touch, gestures, natural language) expand across the digital user journey.”
The many iterations of a mobile touchpoints and data sources, including IoT-connected devices, make it clear that the mobile is not monolithic, and when you’re crafting the customer experience the differences between each needs to be attended to. As Kyle shares, the signals of engagement or intention to buy on an app versus a browser when shopping for say, shoes, is going to look different for each touchpoint.
Thus, merely collecting mobile CX data isn’t enough. That data needs to be standardized and contextualized to provide a clearer picture of engagement with the brand.
Beyond the unique experience of the mobile customer experience, one of the biggest challenges is that mobile devices typically live in their own silos, in part because they have their own unique customer identifiers and endpoints. When you layer in consent and privacy, managing the flow of mobile CX data in a governed way can prove an obstacle.
To overcome it, you need to unify mobile CX data with CX data from other channels. Where many companies stumble is the fact that cross-device authentication can be difficult to achieve. Without a single, underlying data foundation to marry the multiple touchpoints customers encounter, the customer experience will remain fractured.
Lastly. Kyle touches on how marketers rely on developer resources to get value out of mobile data, which are resources that are often limited in their availability. This can slow down a marketer’s ability to remain agile as data needs change.
In order to avoid creating a mobile customer experience that doesn’t align with the web or in-store experience, companies need to create a unified, end-to-end approach to customer data.
The workflow for mobile data can be summarized at a high-level as follows:
1. Collect Mobile Data
Collect and standardize data across all sources, including mobile data.
2. Manage Consent
Collect and adhere to the privacy preferences users indicate in their mobile apps.
3. Create a Single Customer View
Once data is unified and you have consent to use it, you can create a single customer view that allows you to have better personalized omni-channel customer experience.
4. Mobile Integrations
Ensure you can take action on the insights gleaned from a single view of the customer with popular mobile touchpoints by leveraging high-quality integrations with those tools.
The are many ways to benefit from a unified customer experience that includes mobile CX data. One powerful use case that combines mobile data with the in-store experience is geofencing.
With real-time mobile location data being collected, companies can, for example, provide enticing offers when customers travel within a set location near a store. Drawing on context from past web and mobile CX data, a retailer could provide an offer on an item related to past purchases to that customer.
As third-party cookies continue to diminish, authenticated first-party mobile CX data will be a critical window into the relationship between your brand and the customer. If it remains siloed away, it will only exacerbate the challenges introduced by the loss of third-party cookie data.
Hear Kyle talk more about Tealium for Mobile, including more use cases and a demo where he dives into how Tealium for Mobile breaks down the silos between channels. Watch the whole presentation here.
