I had the pleasure of conducting a webinar with Ross Slieght, Chief Strategy Office for Somo, a leading mobile marketing agency and client of mCordis, back in November. Ross has an amazing insight on engaging consumers across the customer journey and he shared it with us in this webinar.  Enjoy!

Webinar Description

Ross Sleight, Somo's Chief Strategy Officer, addresses how to prioritize your mobile strategy so that it's agile, yet meets your KPIs. Find out how to get the best returns across the entire customer journey:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Research
• Purchase
• Service
• Post-purchase

The webinar will share insights on other components like shopper marketing and retail, multi-channel in payments, and the role of social and account servicing. 
 
Speaker:
Ross Sleight 
Chief Strategy Officer
Somo
 
Moderator:
Michael J. Becker
Market Development North America & Strategic Advisor
Somo
 
About Somo: 
Somo is a full-service mobile company with a mission to help businesses make sense of mobile. With unrivaled depth and breadth of mobile experience delivered by a team of 150 global experts, across North America, Europe and Asia, Somo partners with our clients to deliver winning mobile strategies, products and marketing solutions. 

Webinar Recording

Webinar Transcript

Michael:          Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Becker. I'm the Market Development in North American Manager and Strategic Advisor to SOMO and with me today is Ross White, the Chief Strategy Officer for SOMO and we're really excited to have you here today and talk about this concept of mobilizing your customer journey.

                        So in today's conversation we're going to be trying to address a number of different topics. We're going to review mobiles role within the customer journey and our objectives for this conversation is to help you find out how to get the best return across the entire customer journey at every one of the stages; awareness, consideration, the stage where the customer's researching a product.

                        You know, that goal of purchase and transaction and that's where a lot of companies stop, and we're going to continue on to that conversation of how do you engage the consumer in a service model post-purchase? What does that post-purchase customer care and loyalty model look like and then also that cultural look layer?

                        How do you engage people in that environment of both earned and shared media to really wrap things up and have those great and insightful and valuable exchanges with consumers across the board and then finally, we're going to help you gain insights in other components, like shopper marketing retail, multi-channels in payments and the role of social in account servicing. So we're going to round out that entire conversation with the customer journey.

So with me today is Ross White, the Chief Strategy Officer of SOMO and myself Michael Becker and I'll be the moderator for today's call, so Ross, welcome, thank you very much for giving us the time today.

Ross:               Thank you, Michael. I'm super excited to go and talk through the customer journey with you.

Michael:          So at any point in time, please feel free to use your control panel. To the left of your screen you'll see a place where you can engage in chat with the session and if that control panel's missing, you'll see on the top left of the screen it's the hide chat/show chat. So go ahead and click that button and you can open up the chat window and ask Ross and I questions throughout the webinar.

                        In order to not break Ross' flow try not to interrupt him too much and we'll leave most of the questions for the end of today's conversations. But if you do pop in a question that is just so perfectly insightful that it begs and requires to be answered immediately, I'll go ahead and interrupt Ross and have him answer the question.

                        Also, throughout at any point in time we encourage you to share your insights that you're gathering through today's conversation and please use the hashtag still #SOMOGlobal to do that. So with that in mind Ross, I'd like to hand it off to you and please share with us what is this thing the customer journey and what do we do about it?

Ross:               Thank you, Michael, that's great and thank you everyone for joining. So part of this comes out of the–I'm going to set a slide first of all just to set some context around the phenomenal adoption which has been happening with mobile devices and that's really fundamentally changed how we approach digital media. I'm just coming up to my 20th year now in digital media, and I've never been involved in an tour de force which is what's happening here with mobile and the fundamental changes that are going on.

                        So the way which I'd like to try and look at it is to see that there three big trends going on which are making every moment mobile and that's the trend of usage. People who are starting to adopt smartphones and tablets and how many of those people are out there, who they are, what they're using those devices for.

                        The second is around context and how the behaviors have changed with mobile, how consumers are really now leading the ways in which they want to interact, rather than marketers and brands actually leading the consumers and the differences between those contexts of desktop and mobile.

                        And the third is just the increasing speed and velocity of this sector and how we can begin to look at that in a little more detail. So I think we're not going into too much detail, but I think it sort of sets the big trends around the customer journey that you need to start to think about before you start to look at the individual sections of this journey.

                        As we try and get a handle how mobile's affecting your business today in order to be able to work out how mobile will affecting your business tomorrow. So if we just look at the usage side of things we're pretty much getting towards peak smartphone penetration now. You know we're at a point whereby in say the UK and the US, we're around about 70 to 75% into that penetration at home over the last 15 to 16 years or so.

                        So to have reached this type of adoption of smartphones in the time that they have in the last five years or so is quite phenomenal. It's the fastest growing medium that there is. Tablets definitely catching up there are as well. Last Christmas we saw tablet penetration in the US and the UK double over the Christmas period. It's highly likely now come December we'll see this, if not doubling, then at least increasing by 80% and touching probably on 45 to 50% of the population owning a tablet.

Michael:          Hey, Ross? I was just going to object on you on that one. I'm not sure if you're aware, but there's a government funded research center called the Pew Internet Group here in the United States and about two weeks ago, they came out with an updated study and at the beginning of the year tablet penetration in the US was about 17% or so. As your slide shows it got to about 28% and as of about a week ago, the new study shows that tablet penetration s about 36%. So it's growing fast.

Ross:               Wow.

Michael:          Which is amazing if you think about it, you know the tablet didn't exist 180 weeks ago.

Ross:               Yeah, it's phenomenal and we'll talk a little bit about how that's actually changing. How people are consuming different media in tablets. So yeah, after Christmas everything's going to change. We'll see these figures go sky high, and so at that point, we know that customers have pretty much got these in their hands.

                        On a daily basis there are probably two or three of these devices in every household now and we're at a point whereby we can't ignore this as being one of the primary access points for digital. In terms of context this is where changes happen, Michael, I think.

                        We've spent over 15 years understanding about this sort of lean forward PC, desktop phenomenon whereby we're doing quite complex searches and quite long sessions, and a lot of research on quite involved sites, and you just look at the smartphone mobile and it's so radically different. It's on our beings the whole time.

It's got a situation whereby we're picking it up 150 to 200 times a day to answer particular questions and tasks that we might have. You know I might be bored for five minutes, so I'll snack on some entertainment on my mobile. I'll be constantly checking my social feeds and weather and doing repetitive tasks like that. I might be looking for something urgent and I'll turn to my mobile first about it.

So a radical difference to how people use the desktop to the mobile, but what's interesting is how people are starting to use tablet, I think as well. What we're seeing is that all the stats point to the fact that tablet's being used mostly at night, in homes for entertainment based consumption, heavily video focused and it's definitely not in the same type of lean forward experience that the desktop is.

                        And you have a major point about the context, particularly with mobile, less so with tablet, effectively it's being used in conjunction with other media in other situations. So they're stats out here of 85% are smartphone users say they have their smartphone with them and they're dual screening at some point while they're watching TV.

                        I want to talk a little bit about that with regards to how you can sync your TV and your mobile advertising to get a much better sort of performance ratio off the back of that in acquisition. But the other big area of course, since you know, is the area of show rooming, people pulling out their smartphones, not just for price comparisons, but to share information and to go to their friends, pull out what they think is going to be interesting with their friends.

                        What products they're looking at, checking reviews, checking ratings and everything, and so that's the big difference there. So contexts have changed between these devices. No longer can we think about the desktop journey being the pure, focused, single journey we should look at within digital.

Michael:          Hey, Ross. On this context part of the thing, let me check in a little bit, too. Do you see a change in the consumer behavior as well from, as mobile is used? Consumers are increasingly expressing need through mobile. Because when I hear a lot of marketers talk about mobile marketing it's all about these relevance. It's all about personalizing the conversation. It's all about being contextual.

And so often it's a broadcast conversation. You know I need to broadcast my message to be relevant and contextual. But what about the reverse when the consumer is expressing intent through either search or some form of behavior? At what point does context come into play there?

Ross:               Well, I think you're absolutely right there. We've got a multibillion industry based on search intent, but the intent on a mobile device is very different to the intent where you might have a search on the desktop.

                        If I want to find a restaurant, it's likely that I'll be five minutes away from the restaurant that I want to go to, if I'm looking at it on a mobile. So my intent, the gap between the expression of intent on a mobile, and the actual action that happens after it, we've seen it's much, much shorter than it would be in a desktop environment.

Michael:          I've seen studies and it could be as short as an hour where the consumers from a search will take action within an hour on a smartphone. That's part of this context that you're referring to?

Ross:               Absolutely that, yes. What's making this so powerful and so disruptive is that if you have your smartphone within a store and you're looking at products, the chances are that you will be at that point of purchase and not further up in the customer journey where you're just researching.

                        And that's what makes mobile so powerful in terms of influencing sales in the shopping centers themselves, rather than actually the m-commerce aspect of mobile. But we'll talk about that a little bit later on I think.

Michael:          Perfect and finally too, that's just part of that show rooming piece, too. For example, show rooming is essentially an expressed need in the retail environment.

Ross:               Absolutely that and that's a disruptive area of that. Then the other part of this is just the speed. I'll just say the speed to velocity of the introduction of new devices over here in the UK. We've just had one of our major the Tesco's which is the Wal-Mart of the UK bring out a tablet which costs around about $80.

                        And that's a 7-inch Android tablet and so they're going to get mass market penetration and try and gain some traction in the ecosystem there, just as Amazon have done with Kindle. So we've got all the new devices coming out.

                        We've clearly got every 12 months updates to operating systems that provide a plethora of new ways to engage with customers, which we didn't have beforehand and I'll talk about some of that with regards to some of the implications of mobile vouchering and payment later on.

                        And then we've got other platforms that are not actual mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets. We've got these amazing new items like Google Glass. We've got the whole aspect of quantifying yourself through Nike Fuel Bands and you're health and your calories and everything. We've got smart watches coming out, and all of these are requiring different types of interactions, different types of engagements.

                        The key thing is that it's very difficult to plan ahead now for three to five years, as to what your strategy shall be. You've got to remain fairly agile because no longer are you in a situation whereby you can dictate that the platforms are going to remain the same or that the software on those platforms is going to remain the same.

                        So those are three, sort of contexts to the customer journey really and hopefully if I can move on to the next chart. So Michael, I'm just having a little problem at the moment on the–thank you, great. So the customer journey itself, what's really important here is to understand that we need to look at mobile at every single point on the journey. This is not just about mobile marketing.

                        This is not just about making a payment via mobile for m-commerce. It's about how we deal with the post-purchase environment and how mobile can help there. So what we tend to do is we tend to look at the customer journey we segment our audiences. Pick out our key customers and then understand what touch points are currently happening within that journey and then which touch points can be improved through mobile.

                        So where can we move mobile, reduce those barriers, remove friction, and create a better experience for the customers and that has to be looking at it across the whole of the customer journey and the real key thing here is this an ongoing process. Quite often it might be a situation whereby you look at this as a campaign aspect to this, but frankly you're in a position whereby you are looking at this ongoing.

Michael:          Sorry, Ross. We just lost the screen real quick. Let me get that fixed.

Ross:               Okay, that's fine. That's not a problem. So the key points here are to map out the current customer journeys that you have for your key segments, right, and then be able to see how you're currently communicating with them.

                        Not just across digital, but across all your different platforms and see where mobile can begin to reduce those barriers, reduce the friction, and start to prioritize that and that's the key aspect of why we do customer journey work.

                        Which is to get to the heart of the matter across the whole of the business, and so this is not just owned by the marketing department or the IT department, it's owned by everybody in every department from customer services through to sales, through to shop floor people, through to service. Everyone needs to understand, all these departments need to come together and utilize mobile in the business on a long-term basis.

                        Not just on a campaign basis, but on a long-term basis, and so what I wanted to do is just go through really quickly and talk about some of these different areas of the customer journey. Again, so I'm having a little a bit of problems here. Can you just move to that chart? Thank you very much indeed, Michael.

Michael:          No, actually Ross. It always does this. It's just a slight delay in the communications, so you've got complete control of it.

Ross:               Okay. I better not [inaudible 00:15:14] too much, too many times in that case then. So I want to look at each of these particular areas from awareness and consideration to research, to purchase to service and to that loyalty aspect of advocacy and love about a brand or product and how mobile is affecting each of these areas and give a few insights.

                        So the first one is within awareness and consideration, quite often we see new digital media as being purely performance related and therefore we look at the real point of purchase or that initial intent areas that we were talking about earlier on, Michael, as being the point where we look to begin to communicate with people.

                        But it's clear to us that mobile and tablets have a far, far greater aspect or role to play within the awareness and consideration phase. This is US figures for the amount of time spent on each media and the amount of ad spent which is spent on each media. The purple bars–the pink bars are the time spent, the blue bars apps spend, spent.

                        And you can start to see the first thing about this which shocks me is that digital is now the number one medium for time spent in media. So if you add up online and mobile, 24% and 20%, 44% of all consumers time now is spent on digital. That's larger than TV at 37%.

                        And if you look at where the amount of ad spend that's going into that, TV's pretty much in the same area, online is pretty much in the same area. It's mobile which is the real problem here because only 20% of all time is now spent on mobile, outside of calls and email, but only 5.0% of all ad spend is spent on mobile.

                        The big problem here is that ad spend is currently sitting within print, which tends to be where the brand awareness part of advertising is taking place. So the eyeballs are in mobile, right, but the ad spend is currently not there and that's because we . . .

Michael:          Hey Ross, let me ask you a question on that real quick there, too. When we just look–do you think we're doing ourselves a disservice when looking at the industry just at total ad spend as well, because there's a lot more money being spent in marketing across the journey than just ad spend. Likewise, a secondary question is when we look at kind of chart like this, we're continuing to bucket and silo the conversation as a whole.

                        But we hear from the likes of Google and other players this idea of simultaneous screening across all of the channels, so when we look at mobile can you comment a little bit on it? Is it just mobile in the 20% as a silo or might mobile be even more if you think about the simultaneous engagement of it across all these media?

Ross:               Well, on that one actually with an e-marketer where the stats come from and Neilson, they're actually counting every hour that's spent on mobile and every hour that's spent on TV together as an hour for each of those medium. So they're looking at the cross platform usage there.

                        What they're not doing is tying them together on that basis, but you're fundamentally right. There is a lot more budget, which is being spent on mobile across the whole of the customer journey, but the point I wanted to make here was that we're using this wonderful device as a performance-related marketing medium at the moment.

                        And I'm not sure all the stats seem to point that that is one element that you can utilize it for, but there's a huge amount of opportunity to use it for brand engagement, and so the next slide sort of talks a little bit about that. I just picked out some things for the CPG arena, for some tests that were done by Neilson and are commonly on mobile video.

                        And what's really interesting there the pink bars are the ads which they ran on mobile video. The blue bars are those same ads which they ran on online video for desktop and then the light blue bars are the TV campaign that they ran.

                        So using the same creative and we've looked at what was happening within the brand activity there, and as you can see across all of the key brand metrics, mobile is performing better than online and considerably better than TV.

                        And what's really quite interesting there is actually the last one for me, which is the increase in purchase intent. Going back to your point about purchase intent, Michael, right? The mobile is four times more effective at increasing the purchase intent than TV for the same piece of creative that is run there.

                        So we're clearly underplaying the power of what mobile can do within the brand arena and so we've got to look at it as not just being a way of being able to run it as a performance medium, but as a brand medium as well. And a lot of people fire back and say "You know what? The problem is there are not the formats available out there."

                        The advertising formats on mobile to be able to do brand engagement work, particularly brand engagement that is around purchase intent. But we are getting to the point now where we are seeing a plethora of new, amazing types of formats. We can now run video directly in banners, as well as on pre-rolls.

                        We can run very immersive, rich media that almost feels like you're operating an app within the advert itself. And then we've got the whole rise of the native mobile adverts which is branded content and in social, but they're all providing new brand engagement opportunities.

                        And it doesn't just stop there, because coming back to your point earlier, about the cross media usage, Michael. When you integrate mobile with above the line, you get an enhanced halo effect for brand and an enhanced further halo effect for performance as well.

                        So when we've run mobile campaigns which have been synced with television adverts, we've seen a 200 to 300% increase in performance metrics because quite clearly people are turning from a TV ad straight to their mobile in order to be able to generate a type of direct response and we're following this up with a different message on mobile to TV.

                        And that follows through to when we can do things like augmented reality and a lot of wow types of advertising. We're off the page in press, off the page in the outdoor industry, off the page of brochures.

                        And so really what we've got to explore now is to be able to understand how we can engage better with customers and shift some brand metrics whereas doing those very, defined performance metrics within the awareness and consideration phase.

                        So let me just move to the next area here which is with regards to research. So this is obviously digital has fundamentally changed the whole principle of research now. It happened on the best top, but we've seen that mobile and tablets have sort of enhanced that experience.

                        We've seen examples with auto companies whereby people would spend six times going to the dealer center in order to be able to look at a new auto five years ago, but now they spend only one or two times going to the dealer centers to do a test drive, because they've done all their research on the product before, on digital media and increasingly on mobile and tablets.

                        And what we're seeing here on this slide here is that we've got a real audience now which has a number of different devices to turn to within the day in order to be able to their research. So they might pick up their mobiles in the morning on the commute. They might be looking at their PC during the lunch hour.

                        They might be looking on their tablet at night in front of the television and they're swapping between these devices and they're swapping between these devices consistently and looking at them for very particular context.

                        As which is nearest to me or which is better for viewing video on or which has the ability for me to be able to do more enhanced searches. So we're very bad at a digital industry in being able to track this for anonymous users on mobile or on a desktop it's really difficult to track. So if we've got a login we can begin to track.

                        And when we get to login status we get to some really very interesting stats. We've seen sales where if a user starts a research journey on a mobile 80% of them will end up by finishing that journey by buying on a desktop. So if you look at mobile as being a silo on its own within your business then that's not going to work. Because you have to be able to track the user across these digital devices and increasingly if you're a retailer track them into the physical stores themselves.

And that's the big thing I wanted to talk and I just mentioned within research in terms of the show rooming aspect. So the show rooming aspect is happening more and more and more and it's not just about price comparisons. So this was some data that we pulled from COM Score with regards to the percentage of people in the month of June who were actually performing an activity in store on their mobile.

And you can see a lot of this is about the social aspect of it. So they're sending photos of products. They're telling friends and family about products. They're getting their very close recommendations, their advice via their mobile devices. They're scanning things then they're looking for coupons and finding particular stores, and researching product features, and looking for availability and finding reviews and the like.

                        So looking at retail now you cannot ignore the role of mobile within that store environment and there was some very interesting research from the Delights which showed that although m-commerce was only around about sort of 3.0 to 4.0% of the total commerce in the US, but mobile had influenced 16% of all the commerce in the US because they're being used in store and helping people make decisions.

                        I think we can do a lot more in store, to help with this in the customer journey through the wonderful options of the different triggers that we have. So be that through scanning QR codes or scanning barcodes, using NFC, using image recognition.

                        Even moving now to things like low end into Blue Tooth, which is available in IB [inaudible 00:26:28] on top and Android phones, which allows us to be able to communicate. Audio triggers with people like Shop Kick, lots of very, very different ways of being able to engage with customers when they're in the store probably on a Wi-Fi connection in order to be able to help them research and choose the right product. If you help a customer in those stages, it's more likely that they're going to be purchasing from you and remain loyal with you.

Michael:          Hey Ross, real quick. So you just threw out a ton of acronyms. So BLE, and NFC and etcetera, can you define some of those just to help the audience know some of them? Because they may not be aware of them–and then we have a question from Gary as well, who wants to understand are these kind of stats similar across other industries, like hotel and electronics, etcetera.

Ross:               Okay, sure. So let me just deal with the three letter acronym jungle that I just threw out, my apologies for that. So if you look at the physical triggers, top left there is in a QR quick response codes. You know massive in the developing world and China and in Russia, and they've taken a long, long route to the UK.

                        But you basically you need to have a QR reader on your phone. What's interesting is in the new Apple iPhone 7 you've got the opportunity to be able to scan codes for our QR reader which puts passes directly into your passbook. I'll give you an example of that a little bit later on.

                        So we think QR is starting to gain some real traction. Barcode scans are quite obvious. We've seen that happen a lot beforehand with Red Laser and things. NFC, near field communication, so it's the ability to be able to touch your phone against a payment terminal or against a poster, which has a very small chip in there which resets off content basically.

                        Image recognition is basically being able to use your camera to take a picture or alternatively just to scan with your camera an object and for that to be recognized as an image, and then to bring up some form of engagement that happens over the top, like augmented reality or some other forms of information, so to create a real sort of digital layer on top of the physical object that you're holding.

Michael:          Just to interject. The term over the top means what? So people hear that a lot. You know you're saying over the top. Do you want to define that really quickly?

Ross:               So there're two ways. Over the top can mean different services that are produced by third parties over the top of a traditional set of services. So something like What'sApp runs in over the top of the telecom's industries of Sprint and AT&T messaging services. It's something that works exactly the same as it, but it runs over the top, not controlled by the telecom service itself.

                        In this case what I was meaning about over the top I literally was meaning the basis that what you would see is you'd have the physical object and through your smartphone you would see some form of 3D image and be able to interact with that 3D object or image which is physically over the product itself or is the product itself, so it augments the product.

                        And probably what we'll do when we send out the deck is we can probably send out some example of that to show people.

Michael:          Real quick, Ross. One other thing, so Apple just came out with this fingerprint recognition. Would you also see that as a physical trigger for commerce or engagement or we heard that the Mona Lisa's announcing interactive shells, these facial recognition, and mood of consumers at point of sale.

                        In 2015 they're looking at doing interactive shells where I don't even need to do anything. I just need to look at something. Virgin Mobile did that recently too, able to create online interactive advertising simply blinking. So what are some of these other physical engagements?

Ross:               There is a whole set of other ways of being able to interact. I mean I'm really, really buzzed by the Low-Energy Bluetooth, which is effective in Apple products. It's called i-Beacon, but it's also available in Android products as well. And what that allows you to be able to do is to basically put a transmitter, a low-energy Bluetooth beacon into a store or into a physical environment and for that to give out a different message depending on how far your phone is away from that.

So you can think about it, as you're walking into a store, one beacon can tell you hey, here is the latest promotion for today. But when you walk closer into the store it can say actually that promotion I was talking about is 25 meters away on the left hand side of the store and when you get up to that promotion, it can give you a completely different message about why you should be buying that product today on top of whatever the promotion might well be.

                        So it has the ability to be able to communicate many different messages depending on the physical proximity of the customer and that we haven't really seen very much technology that can do that. We've seen things like audio triggers that allow us to be able to provide content up on a phone, but low-energy Bluetooth allows us to be able to provide content up and to understand where we are physically related to that particular beacon.

Michael:          I like what happened to the customer journey from the front of the store to the end cap.

Ross:               Exactly, it's got that precise, yeah. It was interesting I've seen there are a couple of questions with regards to one of the most used of the physical triggers and which physical triggers have the best engagement. And I think what we're finding is that the earlier set of triggers, so QR codes and barcode scans are still getting very high usage because people have come to understand what they mean.

                        I think it takes a long time for customers to actually understand that they can do something with a product when it has a new symbol on it basically. What we're seeing in certain cases though is that the image recognition and the augmented reality for certain fashion customers and for certain press activity that happens with fashion customers we're seeing rates of over 50% of people scanning a physical magazine in order to be able to augment that experience.

                        And again, that's going to be rapidly adopted. All of Ikea's catalogs worldwide now have augmented reality in them through image recognition. You just point your phone at the page and the Ikea app it opens up and you're getting videos about the sofas or instructions on how to make those sofas or what goes well with that sofa. So it's a massive opportunity for people to begin to take what is essentially flat media and bring it into a really engaging experience in the research process.

Michael:          So within that context every surface is now becoming interactive and potentially a point of sale?

Ross:               Absolutely. But what you've got to concentrate is what type of content it is that you've actually put on to those surfaces and how you engage people, which is one of the most interesting areas from my perspective. We do a lot of work with publishers. We do a lot of work with retailers and it's getting quite difficult now in order to be able to see who's a publisher and who's a retailer.

                        Because retailers, particular people like the meta port, say in the luxury industry, have really embraced the creation of content to be able to sell their products, and they're the ones who are leading the field in the augmented reality zone and being able to produce fantastic editorial, which really begins to engage their customers and leads them to begin to purchase.

                        Someone like Grazia, which is a magazine, is now basically putting commerce on the back of its editorials. They're doing exactly the same in meta-porting, but coming from a magazine publisher and they're now selling products wherewith Meta port has a retailer selling products, which is using content.

                        Between the two it's really difficult to tell whether they're retailers or content producers anymore. So within that research phase you've got to be able to produce the right amount of content, as well as being able to get someone to actually physically use that trigger.

                        So just talking then a little bit more about purchase, because I think it's worthwhile just talking about some of the huge shifts that are going on within the purchase arena at the moment. We're seeing a massive disruption happening across payment methodologies and in particular how those methodologies are not just acting on desktop and on mobile, but also in the physical world.

                        And I just wanted to pick out a couple of things like the Veridian Trust in payments in mobile at the moment. I think Amazon have gotten by far and away the most simplified payment mechanism on mobile with one click and that's something which really makes mobile purchasing very, very easy and straightforward. I can just buy something with one click once I've registered.

                        But they're taking that methodology out now into Amazon payments to be used by any retailer or any e- or m-commerce player, which starts to take that Amazon profile and really, really begin to make it simple, super simple for people to purchase if you're an Amazon customer to purchase on another person's site using Amazon Payments.

                        I think PayPal are doing exactly the same and providing very interesting ways of being able to shorten the process of the checkout for mobile customers. And then you've got really interesting new companies like Affirm, which is ex-PayPal guys who are using your social identity as a way of being able to work out whether you're real or not, and therefore be able to basically log you in with Facebook, understand that your Facebook profile is real, and then be able to say that's enough for us to be able to make the payment happen basically.

                        And you've got people like [inaudible 00:37:05] who do this by invoicing as well. They're a particular European place. So there's a lot of disruption happening and all that disruption's really about trying to simplify the process on the mobile. Conversion on mobile is much, much lower than it is on desktop and desktop are slightly lower than we see on tablets.

                        And one of the biggest focuses on that is that people are not prepared to register or to spend as much time on this small screen and the number of steps we have on the desktop are much harder to replicate on the small screen and get people to go through them. So in effect, all these people are trying to make this a simpler, friction-free purchasing journey for people.

Michael:          Hey Ross, can you stay on that real quick. What about the of the area–you hear a lot about Square or American Express' partnership with Four Square where if you checked in and made a purchase with somebody they'll post-purchase discount off of your credit card bill. Where do you see some of these other mechanisms coming into play–coupons and vouchers? In the US we're hearing a lot about mobile couponing and it taking off. Where does that play within the process.

Ross:               Well, let me go on to that, Michael. You're absolutely right. There are two things. One is that people at PayPal and Square are trying to make the digital payment system work offline as well, to work in the store itself, so that I can have one payment mechanism and this is what's really starting to happen.

                        The real battle that's going on behind these guys is who owns the mobile wallet? So we hear a lot about Google Wallet and we hear a lot about Visa's Wallets and PayPal and Isis and in the UK we've–and these mobile wallets basically are a way of being able to try and solve many different problems for the customer.

                        The first is to create a single point of online and offline payment, so that I can have my Google Wallet. I can pay for things online, but I can also take that Google Wallet, and I can pay for things in store as well. So one single piece of payment methodology and off the back of that, they will begin to understand my transaction history. Like they will be able to understand what I'm buying and from that they can begin to provide me with tailored offers and coupons and vouchers.

And because they have an idea of my location with the mobile as well, they then have the ability to be able to make those content and time-sensitive offers. So they know that if I'm standing outside a Starbucks or in the vicinity of a Starbucks that I'm more likely to be–and I've also bought a lot of coffee or I buy coffee every single day then I’m more likely to respond to a voucher to try out their new espresso than I would be if I were sitting at home, because again, it's about shortening that point of intent.

                        And this is really what's really starting to become the next wave of loyalty, right? Because what happens is through all this great, big data that you get can be leveraged commercially to really play at the point of intent, the location, the type of transaction history people have and the ability to be able to action that either online or offline and make the payment.

                        So these wallets are the things that are going to have one of the biggest effects. The question is going to be of course, which wallets are you going to sign up with because you probably only need one and that's where the battle's going to go on. Because the battle is with the data of the transaction history's to be able to provide you with very personalized offers that are contextually aware around you.

                        I think you can start that happening as well that vouchering is becoming more and more powerful and that whilst that's not as integrated with wallets at the moment, we expect that to become the primary focus of wallet's and we know vouchering works. I had this morning, an offer through from Starbucks for me to go and get a free coffee. It was one of those random acts of kindness. It was sent as a mobile voucher directly into my Starbucks app. I got an app notification telling me that it was there and bang, you just got me back into Starbucks, and hands up I bought a muffin at the same time as well, so they cross sold me.

And we're going to see a lot more of this type of contextual information targeted offers. I think Apple's becoming really interesting in this. Apple's Passbook which was frankly more used for travel information than anything else, it's becoming very powerful. I mentioned earlier on that you can now scan, if you have iOS 7 there's a little scan button at the top of the Passbook.

                        And if you see an advert with a QR code which says pass the Passbook, you can actually scan that QR code and it'll put a voucher into your Passbook that can be either redeemed online or again, redeemed in the physical store as well. And those vouchers can also be [geo-fenced] which means that they can only open when you're in the location, in that particular location, and they can also have time delineation.

                        So that means that they can only be there for 24 hours or 12 hours, or two weeks or however long you want to make that voucher occur. And what's interesting for Apple here is that they've gone down the route of creating a wallet, which understands the loyalty aspect of things, but they don't actually have the transactional capabilities yet, to be able to put all your cards into that wallet. Whereas as Google Wallet we will see having this same type of functionality coming out very, very soon and in fact, the new Google Wallet in the US is inching towards that.

Michael:          So Ross, real quick on that. So I heard an interesting comment on that. When you know the difference between say Passbook and say a Google Wallet or a wallet that holds the credit card is Passbooks like the leather, it holds everything but the credit card right now. Eventually it might, but right now it's your coupons and your loyalty cards and your vouchers and such, everything but the credit card.

                        And then there are other wallets that hold your credit card as of right now. Then could you also make the distinction on this in that I've heard this quite a bit because a lot of people are questioning. Do I need an app or not? Of course, a small- to medium-sized business can't Passbook kind of act as an app for you?

Ross:               Fundamentally yeah, absolutely. So by the time you add on Four Square vouchering and Passbook and the multitude of other types of services you can utilize, you don't need to build an app solution directly if you're a small business. What we find and this is another question here about the difference on mobile purchases between apps and mobile websites.

                        What we find is that the mobile website purchases are very generic. A mobile website purchase tends to be driven by search or affiliates or more traditional desktop type activity on a mobile phone just transferred over. So it tends to be a lot of people who make one off purchases from that store.

                        Whereas an app is used by loyal customers because it tends to be that the whole look and feel of the app is slightly better. It's personalized. It's just a better experience to customers who are more loyal, so I will always purchase off Amazon because I'm a loyal Amazon customer on their app around their mobile website.

                        And the toolsets have been coming out for smaller businesses and for large business as well, to be able to get distribution of their mobile vouchers. Passbook is going to be a real play for that because you don't need to have the app environment anymore, you can still use that and particularly within the physical world as well.

                        So it really works for retailers who might have fewer stores and don't want to be able to move people out of those stores into a mobile or an e-commerce environment, but they still be able to reward their customers. And we see it's going to be used considerably.

So I want to quickly move on to service because I realize that we're quite close on time. So one of the things that once you get past this purchase, people tend to stop thinking about how mobile can help you and you've got a situation whereby we see it's one of the biggest areas of mobile because it is picking up–particularly smartphones–is that it can really help get over some of the problems that customers have once they've purchased your product.

                        So it can be used for example to be able to understand what products you have ordered, at a sort of dashboard for all your activity with that retailer. It could be used to track your deliveries. I mean the number of failed deliveries that happen because people aren't home.

                        But if I've got my mobile you'd be able to tell me very quickly that my driver is within x amount of miles from you and will be with you in x amount of minutes so that I can actually get home in order to be able to take that delivery. So again, that's about servicing a customer, but interestingly enough about moving them from a problem whereby the delivery can't be made.

                        Into making it into a positive experience where because of my location and because of the driver's location and because I can work that out, I can tell customers how far away this product actually is from being delivered.

                        And then you've got the whole aspect of servicing and insurances and the whole opportunity to be able to direct people through to make their returns back in physical stores that might have bought on their phone.

                        So a huge number of areas that what we find really useful at this point, Michael, is to go and look through the customer service logs of any company and work out which areas are the ones which are causing the customers to phone up and complain or say I'm getting terrible service because of this, all those little obstacles right?

                        Then work out which of these can be very quickly and easily applied for and basically sold by mobile.

Michael:          You know I heard a great example on that in the US. I don't know if they've done it in the UK yet. There are two examples here. Amazon in their new tablet actually has a video interactive, live video chat with 24/7 customer care for anybody using the tablets. So it was in this stream, I just click a button, a live person pops on the screen and helps me use the tool.

                        It's absolutely amazing and the other one is–there's a company I came across the other day called Attentive who says that if you integrate, in-stream customer service and engagements within the experience in the app, it will increase the use of the word love in product reviews by over 50%.

Ross:               Yeah, that makes sense.

Michael:          Yeah, and so with that in mind, I believe in that regard is it not true that the better the reviews the higher you get up in your app ranking, so it's a real organic way to be servicing your customer. But likewise, creating and improving the upper funnel part of the marketing.

Ross:               Yeah, I think fundamentally particularly in the Android store, Apple Stores quite about volume of downloads. But the Android to Google Play Store uses rankings as their number one criteria, reviews as a number one criteria for where they appear in the store.

Michael:          And on that note, could you also talk about like the Audi example, where they're enhancing the service manual for the car and using augments realities so people can learn how to use their cars.

Ross:               Yeah, I mean what's really interesting is we've been working within the UK with Audi now for three and bit years, maybe four years, and we've moved from just working on marketing all the way through this customer journey with them and within that we've done a lot of work in terms of the brochure work whereby we've augmented the brochure so that you can understand what the near side channel steering assist actually means by playing a video of it.

                        And that helps you understand whether you want that on your car as an upgrade. We're getting to the point whereby Audi technicians will have basically a camera and show you what's wrong with your car on a service straight to your mobile, right?

                        So we're getting to the point whereby all these problems are being solved by customers and we're knocking them off one by one in order to be able to provide a better experience to the customer, and ultimately if you provide a better experience to the customer, your customers will be more loyal.

                        So the other part about service I think is really interesting is the usage of notifications and push messaging and the first thing I wanted to say is that now pretty much email is pretty much right on the mobile devices. So this was on the left hand pie chart there is from experienced marketing services, 50% of all their emails are opened up on mobiles now. That's more than desktop only and webmail together.

                        So you've got a situation whereby all communications are now mobile. But the use of in-app push messaging which is a sort of a hyped up version of SMS is really interesting because once you know who I am, you've got my profile, you can make it personal to me. Once you know where I am, the time of that what type of connectivity I've got.

                        If I'm on Wi-Fi or whether I'm on 3G, whether that app will be able to tell whether I'm on the move, whether I'm in the office. Once they know where your location is, again, that whole geo-targeting, geo-offense sync. And then also once you know where I am in the process, so I might have been looking at a product, but haven't bought it or I might have got to level 42 of Angry Birds and never played it again because it's just too hard for me.

                        And also with my social contacts, I can take all this information and start to begin to provide really personal, context sensitive, engaging messages to you through your mobile device. This is the ultimate dialogue opportunity that brands have, and this isn't being used in the right way.

This is being used in a way which is a bit like email. It's a blunt instrument. It's something whereby I send out the same offer to a million people or whatever it will be and push messaging is now something which is very personal and I think this is one of the most exciting areas for customer relationship management.

                        Because of its engagement opportunities and contextual opportunities and something that people like Urban Airship and App Buoy and App-oxy and all these other guys who are doing CRM based push messaging services are really beginning to understand how this will help them engage with their customers post- and actual action post to purchase.

                        And then finally I just wanted to talk a little bit about the advocacy and love area of where mobile's coming on. I mean unsurprisingly just like most of emails being opened up on mobile, Facebook access, 70% of people access their Facebook at least once a month through mobile, 80% of all Twitter access is mobile.

                        Social is mobile. You can't in any single way pull these two away from each other. They're absolutely interlinked, and I just thought of some really interesting ideas of how you create, how you'd help people create content. How you begin to take great content and socialize that. How you'd get people to be into not just–to really engage with your brand through social.

                        I just wanted to pick out a couple of ideas here. I really liked Ben & Jerry's and the work they were doing on Pinterest of taking fans pictures and creating the experiences that their customers were having with Ben & Jerry's, the brand, a lovely way of being able to socialize it, and just a day after Pinterest's $225 million investment and next round of funding.

                        They also said that 75% of all of Pinterest's accesses are now via mobile, so it's a fascinating area to be able to look at how you being to socialize an ad via advocacy and love. Again, I think Starbucks are leaders in this as well, with regards to their use of Instagram and the hashtag Starbucks, so that people can put in their own photographs with what Starbucks they're getting and how they're enjoying them.

                        You know you've got other areas of real interest, like Fancy and how they create socially curated streams for fashion, which I can follow. So what we're seeing with mobile is that it’s the information and content that's being produced by people which is all this stuff is being shared the most in the show rooming, is undoubtedly the stuff that people want to begin to engage with and that makes social absolutely entwined with mobile.

                        And then I'm just conscious of time. I just wanted to talk just a little bit about how people should be looking at creating personalized experiences on mobile. Because there's a great old Prieto Principle, you know 80% of your value or your revenue comes directly from 20% of your customers. There was a great research by Cubits released this week, which showed that 1.0% of all customers generate 40% of all retail sales.

                        And you've got to look after your customers. These are the ones who are the most loyal to you. They're the ones who are going to advocate you. They're the ones who are also going to be your fiercest critics as well. Where I think the people like Amazon do that is, they try and personalize their experience so that it is more relevant to me.

                        So even though they sell millions and millions of products, when I go onto Amazon's mobile sites, I'm there being able to understand what products Amazon think I'm interested in because I've either looked at them beforehand or that they're products which other people who like products like that are being recommended to me or that they're just products that they think are just really interesting for promotions.

                        I buy more products through Amazon through the Kindle daily deals promotions that come out to me than my wife should really know about. Effectively personalization creates a much stronger bond and much greater loyalty to customers and that's what you've got to do to be able to start to service that top 1.0% or a top 20% of your customers, is start to make the experience personal.

                        Not just what you do on your mobile sites, but also how you use push messaging as well. So that's some of the thoughts that we've had about how you might be able to apply mobile to different parts of the customer journey. I think that the key takeaways for me in this and hopefully for your guy will be that you're going map your customer journeys by each audience segments.

                        You've got to work out where those barriers are, where the friction is, where mobile can begin to take those problems away. You can really take those being the priority points that you need to be able to address first. So if you've got a massive problem with deliveries, for example, it's not a case of trying to solve the problem of acquiring new customers in mobile.

                        It's actually about an opportunity for you to be able to solve that problem about deliveries through the mobile channel and that's where your priority should be. That's where your investment should be. Look at where you can begin to use mobile across any surface, any form of other media. So super excited about the opportunities of being able to link TV and mobile together, to link press or augmented reality through mobile together, about what you can do in store to help people.

That's a real opportunity to begin to provide a much more engaging experience. And the way at SOMO where we looked at this, we talk about doing the basics brilliantly and creating wow moments.

                        So I'm not so sure that you're going to get a massive wow moment by first being able to solve delivery problems through mobile, but what it will do is create a solution to a basic problem and that is a fantastic thing to do. But it's not going to be the same as a wow moment of going and creating some sort of 3D object off a page. So you've got to balance what are the fantastic things that we can do with mobile, as well as making sure that you're solving real customer problems.

                        And then the final part of this is that we're at peak penetration, we're heading towards greater, greater usage the whole time with mobile. Do not start off with desktop and try and port it into the mobile environment. There are different contexts there, but ensure that you try and embrace mobile at every single stage of the journey and link it in to desktop activity, link it into real world activity. Do not just view it as a silo.

Michael:          That's fantastic, Ross. Thanks and one last point. What are your comments on the thought of mobile from a specific kind of marketing campaign perspective versus the entire relationship of the consumer over time?

Ross:               So do you want to expand a little bit on that, Michael, for me?

Michael:          Yeah, for example, I recently taught a course and they're doing their homework on the customer journey and they all just focused on the journey of a particular campaign versus the iterative lifecycle of engaging a consumer over time.

Ross:               Yeah, so one of the things that I said up front is that I think you've got to write a customer journey for every different type of customer so for each of your segments, you've got to look at that customer journey and that will get you a lot of different campaigns.

                        But you've also got to be aware of the basis that's that journey the customer is going on will change and you will need to adapt and create more opportunities to deepen the engagement or to remove barriers and remove friction. And you're never done in mobile, right? You should never be done in it because if you're done in it, you're not thinking about the next problem you want to solve.

                        So it's fine to look at things in a campaign basis for a particular audience and have particular KPI's and objectives set against that, but that should just be able to feed into the bigger journeys and the bigger issues that you want to be able to try and solve and look at this as a long-term process with your customers to try and help them and engage them on these platforms.

                        So you've got to look longer term. You've got to look at being able to solve it again and again and again, not just stop at one campaign.

Michael:          All right, Ross. We are running a little late on the time and we do have some unanswered questions and so we'll get back to those people and if any of you have enjoyed today's conversation or want to learn more about the customer journey and how to engage the customer throughout the journey you see Ross' email and Twitter tag up there.

                        Be sure to reach out and follow up with him and likewise we'll be continuing to do more and more of these webinars down the road. There are a number of resources out there in the industry too for you to learn more about mobile. So for example, check out SOMO's website. Mobile Marketer is a great place for case studies.

                        E-Marketer is a wonderful place for audience measurement and activities. Then you've got associations like the Internet Advertising Bureau. You know in the UK they just came up with a top 50 rich media campaign and they have a whole portal for you to see really stellar work that's being done in the marketplace and the Mobile Marketing Association has additional resources as well.

                        So Ross, if you can just kind of wrap up. What would be the one or two things that people should do immediately and take immediate action on what they've learned today?

Ross:               I would sit down with a cross-disciplinary team in your business or if you're an agency with your clients, right? And I would go and spend a day with a whiteboard working out the customer journey. I think by doing that you will surface a lot of problems and you can then look at which problems you can begin to solve with mobile and by that you will then know where you're going to put your prioritization and money into it.

                        It's what we do with every new customer who comes into SOMO is we need to understand those journeys first of all, because if you don't, you're going to put the money essentially in the wrong place. It's not going to solve those customer problems. So that's what I would do and I would make sure it's not just sitting down with the marketing department or with the IT department.

                        I would make sure I'm sitting down with representatives in every single part of that customer–who has contact with that customer. You will then be able to have a very clear view of how mobile can help your business today.

Michael:          Fantastic and with that, Ross, we are out of time so thank you very much. Again, if anybody wants to get in touch with SOMO, please reach out and hello, SOMO at global.com. We following this seminar by sometime close of business tomorrow we'll be sending out the decks and the recording of the webinar and feel free to share this with your colleagues as well. So Ross, thank you very much. We'll wrap it up there.

Ross:               It's been great. Thank you very much for your time, Michael, and thanks everyone very much indeed for coming and listening and as Michael said, any questions, just fire them through.

Michael:          Perfect, thanks everybody, bye-bye.

Ross:               Cheers.