Role of Mobile Apps in Digital Customer Experience

Nitten Bbinhhani
Feb 12, 2019
2 min read

Updated: Jul 15, 2019

As per the research firm IDC, the smartphone market in India grew 14.5% in 2018 with shipment of 142.3 million units. Mobile has now been a critical part of every customer journey, according to Facebook IQ, 45% of shopping is being done via mobile phones. Companies have realized that customers today have more choices than ever before and if they want to outperform their competitors, they must offer an unparalleled customer experiences in their sector.

A new trend that many companies are beginning to invest, is by offering an unparalleled customer experience on their cross platform mobile apps. After all the customers are now constantly on their smart phones, and are using it to perform more functions than ever before.

I'm gonna split this article into 2 parts, the first part i.e. "Digital Transformation in Sales & Marketing" covers how the companies can use mobile apps to deliver wow experience to its prospects (Pre sales) and it's conversion process (Sales). Having said that let's now cover the 2nd part i.e. the Post Sales journey experience. It's also mandatory to share that both the posts are based on the real estate sector, yet can be easily customized to other sectors as well.

Early Aug-2017, our phone lines were jammed, email servers were down, server hosting the customer portal went down, and our customers complained even our websites were too slow. Like many real estate companies, we too were facing the aftermath of MahaRERA. 9000+ customers were trying to get in touch with us simultaneously, just to understand the changes on our project/s w.r.t MahaRERA. That's when this idea of a dedicated mobile app was born!

The big question to ponder was, why can't we let our customers have the complete information, right in their mobile phone?

It's 2019, irrespective of their industry, companies will have to match (if not exceed) the Amazon standards of digital experience across the customer journey. Those who still follow the adage old practices of landlines, emails, or even dare I say customer portals on their websites must prepare for extinction, sooner than they thought.

Here's how the mobile app could help in post sales journey?

Payment Details: Summary of all payments made (or in process) and any dues pending. Companies can also use the 'Notifications' column to alert, prior to raising any fresh demands.
Booking Details: This covers various inventories, owned by the customer.
Applicant Details: Generally used by the companies, but allows the customer to change their contact details.
Construction Status: The updated construction status for their project/s with a link to YouTube (if at all the company is uploading the construction status videos on their channel).
Self Help & Customer Service: On an average 80% of their queries can be resolved by the customers themselves, only if you provide the content in an fairly organized and easy to understand manner. Customers can also track the status of their complaints or raise a fresh complaint.
Chat Bots: By 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled by chat bots, need I say more. One such example of interaction is given below.