The most critical success factors in the development of a mobile engagement channel are ease of discovery and overall user adoption. Making native and mobile web apps easy to find goes beyond putting them into an app store where customers must leave the operator experience to explore the hundreds of thousand apps to find operator utilities and platforms. Raising the profile and visibility of your Mobile Self-Care and commerce apps involves making them accessible at moments when users are most likely to need them. Having a rapid and lightweight deployment method that users can access with minimal clicks and no downloading is paramount. Applications that can be invoked after alerts, sms and notifications provide critical moments when users can interact with Self-Care in a meaningful fashion. Providing tight integration into the overall customer experience makes apps easy to find and use in a repeated manner.
Leveraging automated user profiling, the MobileAware platform supports segmenting and subsequently messaging the most likely subscribers with a propensity to use Self-Care or other mobile utilities. Once the first use is detected, subscribers can add an application icon to any device, whether it’s a smart or feature phone. This lightweight icon or launcher provides a mobile web experience or a native application based on the preferred user experience. The MobileAware platform includes a cloud to device Icon Delivery Platform (IDP) that puts an icon directly on a user’s device for repeat usage.
User adoption can present a significant challenge for applications deployed in any fashion. Getting sustained, repeat usage is a function of delivering a great customer experience and providing value that ensures users will come back. User adoption is achieved using a number of core principles:
Usability is a major issue that impacts how users adopt a mobile application. Mobile applications’ effectiveness is measured in page-loads and clicks. The MobileAware platform empowers some of the richest user controls and mobile web interaction components to deliver capabilities in mobile applications. Additionally, these components can progressively enhance or gracefully degrade across the entire spectrum of devices.
Latency in a mobile Self-Care or commerce platform will ensure that user adoption will be low. When using an operator’s online Self-Care experience to help support the deliver of a mobile self care channel, it is critical that the overhead and resource intensiveness of non-mobile optimized page flow is repeated. In order to have a highly efficient and fast mobile application, the MobileAware platform ensures efficiency in three key areas:
- Light weight mobile app presentation and business logic framework delivers not only template solution components (Cloud-Care and App-Store-in-the-Cloud (ASIC)), but also allows operators to rapidly configure customized mobile flows that are optimized for usability. These could include optimized drop lists, application control components, display tables and matrixes, geo-location and application transitions. Rather than using proprietary IDEs that introduce resource-heavy and unnecessary abstraction, the MobileAware platform helps construct rapid mobile applications.
- Industry-leading integration architecture that supports the evolution of a mobile application flow is preferable to repackaging existing online user flows that can introduce latency. Mobile applications user experiences that cannot quickly access integration and back-end components will be slow and have bad user experience. The MobileAware platform can allow for any variety of integration approaches. For more see Simple and rapid integration.
- The platform provides network optimization for content and page components that are not only lightweight, but also capable of optimizing the mobile browser for offline, cached and client-side application processing (primarily for webkit and HTML 5 applications). These components create fast mobile applications while also enabling perceived user latency, even while improving actual latency is not an option.