The customer is always right

Giving mobile customers a great online experience should be a top priority for any business, says Steve Weston, Hays CIO.

When it comes to its online storefront, does your company put out the welcome mat for visitors using mobile devices? It should do. After all, over one in five online purchases are now made from smartphones and tablet computers, according to figures from management consultancy Capgemini and IMRG, the UK’s industry association for online retail.

This is a lucrative and growing audience that is neglected by websites designed for desktop PCs. Try to use a mobile device to view them and cluttered interfaces, impassable navigation links and images that are slow and costly to download make the experience a nightmare. So what’s the answer?

Mobile platforms – where to start?

UK retail powerhouse John Lewis launched a mobile-optimised website back in 2010, followed up by apps for iPhone (December 2011) and Android (August 2012). The results speak for themselves: in April 2013, John Lewis announced that it now makes over £1 billion per year from online sales, with mobile devices accounting for over 25 per cent of the traffic to johnlewis.com.

In the US, meanwhile, nine out of ten of the nation’s top retailers offered a mobile site and/or an app as of mid-2012, according to retail technology provider Crossview. These companies include Macy’s, Walmart, Staples and Sears.

While unique apps can be phenomenal branding tools, currently it is expensive and difficult to develop apps for different devices. Given the huge number of smartphones and tablets, operating on a range of different mobile platforms, finding the skills to do  it is challenging. As a result, it only makes sense to do it for critical apps targeting a specific market or offering a unique functionality – and they’re few and far between.

Being flexible

A cheaper and swifter alternative is to develop a ‘responsively designed’ mobile site. These are built from scratch to optimise access by many different devices, as long as they have a web browser, and they are a great fit for different mobile device touchscreens, where space is short and every pixel counts.

Increasingly, businesses are asking their web developers to take this approach, and that’s creating a boom in demand for people with the skills to make it happen While IT departments need to step up to the plate, so too do marketing teams, and that means a closer working relationship between these two very different functions.

Back in 2011, an IBM survey of chief marketing officers revealed that 79 per cent of marketing heads expected to encounter high levels of IT complexity in the five years ahead and over 52 per cent said they felt ill-equipped to deal with it. The IT department is uniquely placed to help here.  Creating a shopping experience that is fast, efficient and secure means businesses are going to need an array of new skills and a new set of structures. Perhaps the biggest change of all will be to bring IT from the back office to the very front of the business.

Time is ticking. In 2012, 24 per cent of UK consumers used a mobile device to do at least some of their Christmas shopping, according to analysts at research company Econsultancy. Figures from the US suggest a mobile shopping spree there, too, with mobile commerce sales up 171 percent over 2011 figures.

For Christmas 2013, it’s likely to be far more. Those companies that don’t extend a warm online welcome may be forced to watch festive shoppers take their custom elsewhere.

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