Maximising Mobile with Virgin Media 02 and Holland & Barrett, London

Customer expectation in the mobile era

In a mobile-first world, customers expect more than just functionality - they expect experiences that are intuitive, fast, and personalised. Apps must deliver immediate value, provide seamless navigation and offer features that enhance convenience. 

You have to be useful, because time is short and so is customer patience. Jonathan Haywood, former Director of Digital at Holland & Barrett said: “Most people only use 10 apps regularly; if your app lacks value or utility, you risk deletion.”

“Customers have expectations for brands to get it right every time, because switching brands now is easier than ever. Apps need to be continuously updated and elevated to make customers feel like brands care about them and their experience.”

Understand where your users are, and how to meet them there

A key part of meeting these ever-growing customer expectations is understanding where your users are, and subsequently meeting them where they are.

Our event attendees had been surveyed before the evening, which revealed that mobile usage skewed toward Apple with 58% on iOS devices compared to Android. Whereas the global mobile audience is weighted heavily the other way with Android's market share worldwide at 71%.

“It can be easy to take a view based on smaller groups or more regular customers, as opposed to the wider audience base we might be trying to reach," said Apadmi’s Group Marketing Director Jake Sargent. "It’s important to keep this in mind as we build experiences for our audiences that we want to be relevant and useful to them.” 

This is a discussion point that reared its head at multiple points during the evening. In some circumstances, a mobile experience does not have to equate to an app, especially for those with a low customer frequency who can’t justify the cost of creation and continuous upkeep.

When the starting brief is 'we want an app’, the question should always be 'what's the objective for both business and customer'.

An app might not be the answer to everything, but having a clear and effective mobile experience strategy has to be a key part of the solution to ensure you're meeting them where they are, whether that's via social platforms, marketplace integration or partner channels.

Get the basics right…

An important part of creating a stand-out mobile experience, which will stay both downloaded and used, can often be about getting the basics right first.

“Holland & Barrett focussed on making the mobile app easy and simple to shop on whilst giving a compelling reason for in-store customers to download the app,” said Jonathan, who was formerly Director of Digital at the leading wellness retailer. “Only once we got that right, did we then add elements such as gamification.

"The app grew five fold in just two years, and we could see that app customers spent more, proving the correlation between an app download and greater customer spend.”

Then add functionality

Having nailed the basics, that's the time to move onto adding elevated features and functionalities. Without the right foundations, users may not find enough utility to make it to the extra features. When they do, what sort of trends are shaping experiences?

And what discussion wouldn't be complete without mentioning the elephant in the room - AI.

“Many brands are exploring," said former Directore of CX at VMO2 Marie Felihoe. "H&M are doing it well with their AI digital stylist - it’s serving customers who are time poor but fashion conscious, meaning they don’t have to spend time scrolling, and the experience is as seamless as possible.”

Agentic AI (the ability to act on behalf of users and tap into preferences and previous behaviours) is also gathering momentum. Apadmi recently presented a prototype demo that goes one step further than an AI assistant - an AI agent which can make decisions rather than just reporting information back. The demo was built to demonstrate the potential in the world of pizza delivery, but the possibilities are endless.

“Not only is the AI taking natural language requests," explains Apadmi's Chief Strategy Officer Marcus Hadfield. "Not only is it recognising who you are, what you’ve done in the past and your personalised preferences, it's also looking into the back-end of the systems and looking at stock availability, delivery time, and making recommendations to the customer in real time.”

The opportunity to create experiences which deliver value not only to the business but to the customer are huge - but they’re largely still emerging and are certainly one to watch.

The (uneven) evolution of CX

So which sectors are managing to meet customer expectations at the right place, with a seamless mobile product? It’s clear CX has evolved and things have moved at varying speeds for different sectors.

According to Marie, the Retail and Technology industries are largely leading the way when it comes to seamless, personalised interactions which engage users.

Marie, who formerly worked at JustEat, shared how the brand used gamification in their app during that first order journey to keep users engaged during the waiting period between ordering and receiving their food. They also leveraged partnerships to promote appealing products for customers to explore during that waiting period, allowing them to unlock additional revenue streams.

This is of course harder for more heavily regulated industries like financial services, but not impossible.

“If banks can balance the nuances of digital transformation with effective in-person touch points," said Marie, "there is a chance to maintain and nurture that emotional connection between brand and service.”

Utilities are also a sector where mobile experience is often lacking; Jonathan even shared a personal experience with his own water supplier and its poorly rated app. He said: “There are some apps that you can’t really avoid such as utilities - they can have terrible CX but you still need it and won’t delete it. They are unloved and just launched and left - with bad CX really lowering brand perception.”

Loyalty as an output, not just a scheme

Thinking beyond the basic offers and deals that many brands provide and finding real ways to reward loyalty with personalised experiences is becoming a much more popular way to look at loyalty - 'real, not a deal'. Or put another way, treating loyalty as an output, rather than a scheme.

“It is easy to think of loyalty as schemes, as points, as prizes, as membership," said Marcus. "But real loyalty is deeper than that. Those things are all really important and valuable, but this doesn’t equal long-term loyalty.”

Re-think apps as a big media channel

The size of audience commanded by apps from larger retailers is staggering and can often outweigh the numbers driven by other channels like broadcast and social media. Brands like Co-op, Asda and Domino’s all command regular app audiences in excess of 5 million, which has led to a certain shift in perspective.

Many grocers have already created media networks as a way to create new revenue streams. These standalone divisions sell retail space within stores and real estate in mobile apps could be viewed in much the same way. 

“Once you start thinking about apps in a brand way, and a way to build your brand, that’s really empowering,” says Marcus. "With Apadmi’s mobile experts on hand, our client Co-op uses its app to promote fairtrade credentials, Co-op Live experiences and more, driving brand values and staying front of mind in a way beyond mere functionality. The data is miles better, the tracking is miles better, and the personalisation is miles better - there are big opportunities here.”

If you are looking for ways to unlock new value with an elevated mobile experience for your customers, we’d love to hear your goals and see how we could help you to achieve them. Contact us today.