It will yet take some more time for the day when you don’t have to present usernames and passwords or enter account numbers but your device just knows it’s you without the need for any manual interaction. No fingerprints, no passkeys, no retina scans, maybe some form of a DNA recognition tech. Too far-fetched? Right. Nothing like that is happening anytime soon, so we just have to stick with what we have right now.
And that best authentication system we have right now is the password coupled with the smartphone. Passwords have been the best bets at identity management and their eventual authentication and with mobile bringing a mini revolution, it appears we’re insured for some time. Mobile has not just become our identity, but it is also a permanent channel between businesses and customers. Full-fledged engagement and loyalty campaigns would have been impossible without mobile devices. But, wait. Is that all?
Well, despite mobile being such a proven force, digital marketers are still ignoring it. In a very recent report, research agency Forrester has said that businesses must fully integrate mobile technologies into their marketing strategies this year, giving the obvious implication that businesses haven’t actually been able to do so until now.
Forrester said that while marketers do fully realize the potential that mobile holds for their business, curiously, they don’t know how to use it effectively. “Mobile is the most disruptive change in consumer behavior in years. Marketers know this and they keep saying mobile is strategic. However, reality is that they struggle measuring ROI of mobile because they do not clearly articulate how mobile can serve their marketing objectives and because they don’t measure the right metrics,” Thomas Husson, vice president and principal analyst of marketing and strategy at Forrester Research, explained in the report.
That seems conclusive but seems to coherence. Especially because the differentiation between Web applications and mobile applications is rapidly fading away. But importantly, the differentiation tends to be invisible from the customer’s perspective only. If actively using mobile as part of the marketing strategy, businesses still have to do quite a bit of back-end work (unless they are using an efficient Customer Identity Management tool) to make sure that Web and mobile don’t bring data silos to the table. This involves a lot of integration work, also called unification of the customer profiles, considered extremely hard by organization so much so that about 30% businesses think this is a huge barrier to providing a better Customer Experience (CX), as per an Adobe-Econsultancy study.
As Forrester put it, maybe a lot of companies don’t understand how mobile serves their purpose, maybe in some cases it doesn’t, but in Gartner terminology, mobile is a key player of the Nexus of Forces which is the basis of the complete Digital Marketing strategy, the other three being cloud, information and social. You leave one of them out of your strategy and you are missing out on huge revenues. Most companies now tend to leave a hole in the jigsaw because they just didn’t figure out that one piece.
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