My Kingdom For A Smartphone!
Why today's Shakespearean protagonist could well find himself beseeching the heavens for a smartphone.
Why today’s Shakespearean protagonist could well find himself beseeching the heavens for a smartphone.
Originally published at OpenMarket.com
“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” In one famous Shakespearean scenario a horse was considered to be worth an entire kingdom, being the only thing that stood between King Richard the Third and certain death. Today’s Shakespearean protagonist could well find himself beseeching the heavens for a smartphone.
Smartphones are quickly but surely replacing a dazzling array of technology for many people: cameras, radios, CD collections, portable TVs, print news, stopwatches, flashlights, alarm clocks, day planners, wrist watches, calculators, Dictaphones, maps, and even the mighty rolodex.
Humans are addicted to smartphones. As far back in time as 2011, already two thirds of us were going to sleep beside our smartphones, and checking them first thing every morning. In a study by Telenav, 63% of people would forgo the luxury of chocolate and 21% would go without shoes, rather than go a week without their smartphones.
Companies that successfully tap into our mobile addiction are reaping rewards that would make a King blush. Apple recently reported profits of $18.04bn, the largest corporate profit of all time, driven largely by sales of the iPhone 6. According to some reports Apple has three times the cash of the US Treasury. Apple’s lucrative genius continues to push the boundaries of mobile technology, crossing into new and exciting areas of the end-to-end customer experience.
Mobile devices are set to revolutionise the high street shopping experience with proximity marketing. Apple’s typically astute combination of the iPhone, Apple Watch, iBeacon and NFC, in one seamless ecosystem, might have the same revolutionary effect on retail that iTunes had on digital music.
But what does our mobile addiction mean for major enterprises, and the mobile-savvy customers they seek to have meaningful connections with across the entire lifecycle? A comprehensive Enterprise Mobile Engagement strategy is as vital to global brands as the aforementioned horse to the aforementioned King. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, everyone on the planet will be online within five years, largely via always-connected mobile devices. Customers are on their mobile devices almost every waking minute, and are approaching zero tolerance for a bad customer experience. According to Harris Interactive 86% of customers will stop doing business with a company because of a bad experience; this is up from 59% only four years ago. Quality is King.
At OpenMarket we recognize the vital importance of effective enterprise mobile engagement. We are seeing more and more companies using mobile to help them interact better with their customers and employees, and improve their business operations. To that end, we have made available a new report from Forrester Research titled, "Create Mobile Moments with Messaging." In this report, Julie Ask and colleagues lay out the opportunities to use mobile messaging across the entire enterprise customer lifecycle. The white paper also outlines how to use the IDEA cycle to identify the most important mobile moments, and shares tactics on how to use messaging to its full potential.
Mobile messaging has proven its effectiveness and ubiquity, so the white paper shares key data on how to design effective messages, how to engineer your business to support messaging, how to use mobile analytics, and how to leverage evolving messaging best practices. The report examines how the power of messaging is rooted in its immediacy, rather then personalization, and shows how mobile messaging moments extend throughout the entire customer journey. It also asks why enterprises are still challenged to engage consumers beyond marketing, and identifies which pain points can be alleviated with mobile messaging.
So can we imagine the Shakespearean King reincarnated as a modern day businessman, offering his kingdom for a Forrester white paper? Well that’s probably stretching the analogy, but I think you’ll find this research useful. You can download our King-sized white paper from this link: http://www2.openmarket.com/forrester-creating-mobile-moments-white-paper
Photo credit: David Brandon Geeting
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