MOBEXX 2019: Putting the customer at the heart of the mobile experience

With creating great experiences at the centerstage of every marketer’s strategy, how the entire mobile experience can be optimised for customers has become of paramount importance.

‘Customer at the heart of Mobile Experience’ was the focus of discussions at an interesting panel discussions at MOBEXX 2019. The session was moderated by Priyanka Agrawal, co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Fractal Ink Design Studio linked by Isobar, while the panellists included:

Abhishek Majumder, Design Studio Head, Think Design

Bindu Balakrishnan, Country Head, DCMN India

Biswajit Borkataky, Head of Operations, Editorji Technologies

Lloyd Mathias, Angel Investor, Marketing & Business Strategist

Mrinalini Ghadiok, Editor, STIR

Sakshi Chadha, Head of Marketing & Communication, Payback India

Handling customer rejection, uninstalls

Biswajit Borkataky: There is very little real estate that you can play with and I think the most expensive real estate today is the home screen of a mobile phone. We at Editorji use a lot tracking mechanism to find out how stories are doing. Most of our team members are from television, so it was a huge mindset change for them. As opposed to television, in the mobile space when you put out a story, you can track who is watching that story, how many times are they watching, and if they are dropping out from the story, we need to change what we are doing with the story.

You need to strategise about your content so that your users don’t drop off. This apart, instead of getting everybody to come and experience your platform on your app, why not make your experience available with other partners? We started talking to a lot of partners like Airtel, Panasonic, Xiaomi and make the Editorji experience available on these platforms in our native format, which has also helped us monetise it.

Customer centricity

Lloyd Mathias: I think in any start-up scenario one needs to logically look at what is the extent dependence on the digital interface. Clearly, a lot start-ups today are digitally inclined. There are two aspects that you can look at:

1) The IP - what is unique about that particular platform , property or start-up; and

2) Attention to detail or extent to which they go and mind insights to create a better user experience

My limited experience in this place is been that start-ups don’t focus enough on user experience, which to my mind, is a game play. No matter how small the start-up or how early stage you are, if you do not major at the same experience that global giants offer, you are bound to lose out. Increasingly, consumers always benchmark the best-in-class, for example, Amazon Flipkart, etc.

Agency’s role in educating the customers

Abhishek Majumder: As agencies, there is a two-fold role that we play. The first is when companies come to us, typically they would have a sense of a brief of what is it that they want to build and who they are targeting, so through our research we kind of hold a prism to that to have a reality check. Secondly, as design agencies, we need to understand the business objectives and try to work together to see if there are other ways of achieving that.

Internalising the thought process of customer centricity

Mrinalini Ghadiok: For us, the challenge was shifting from print to digital. Most of our writers come from design background, so we’ve got designers and architects who write content for us. We had to re-train them and re-direct their energy into how somebody is going to be consuming content on a digital platform. How content is displayed on the platform became important – in print we never used to do video, but on digital today, most of our interviews are video-based.

It is a complete mindset shift that we needed to do, keeping in mind the fact that consumers today want to see more videos. As a model, video works well on mobile and on desktop. Lengthy written interviews are not something that people want to read on a mobile app, even though they might read them on their desktops. Since 65 per cent of our consumers are on mobile, we had to make that shift.