CIOs never fail at mobile CRM initiatives (because they don't do customer strategy)

Back after a month of quiet, mostly recovering from a mad quarter of travel, conferences and research on mobile CRM. It has been eye opening to see the complacency around most businesses around mobile. The view is: Digital Marketing is doing a fabulous job with customers. IT doesn’t consider customers customers in any case. They are just consumers of the products and services. The ones who pay us the money. But ‘my’ department heads and division heads - in HR, in logistics, in merchandising, in support, in sales - THOSE are real customers!

Here you cannot avoid recalling Steven Wright’s line, “If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.” And what makes this tough is that there is no “You” who is looking out for the customer who is transitioning to a mobile device for more and more of their needs. Who will design the mobile applications with customer support built in? To ensure that the same advanced search, or Chat option, or bi-modal capabilities (live Chat while doing an action in self-service, for example), or consistent process design, or analysis of mobile application usage - time in app, path to app, success with app function…..? Who is the “You” who owns the mobile customer experience?
[caption id=“attachment_77177” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image: Thinkstock[/caption]
I just finished a piece of research about this, and if you are a client you can access it at http://www.gartner.com/document/2759117 . It is called ‘Six best practices to deliver powerful mobile consumer-facing applications.’

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In the next few weeks we will publish an overview of 18 research notes that take a comprehensive look at the Mobile Enterprise. For now, the key finding is that Marketing has done an awesome job, and still - Mobile is an island. Customer support is inconsistent with other channels. It is still a separate channel. Support agents are blind to who the mobile customer is - in real time - and what they are looking for, what they have looked for, and how to help them NOW.

Everyone points to the brilliant mobile applications, but there is little emphasis on the failure of the mobile applications in the hands of customers. Maybe it has to do with the expression, phrased many ways, that success has many fathers; though failure has none. Under 1 percent of businesses we’ve spoken to Jan-May 2014 had an ‘owner’ for the overall mobile experience.

Great companies are getting the mobile metrics in place, understanding the ‘state of the mobile customer,’ and establishing the baseline measures of success. This is not something that the CIO is sometimes involved with, but increasingly the VP of Customer Experience or the like is ascendant.

The author is Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research. Maoz focusses on CRM and customer-centric Web strategies.