Mobile Archives | According to Fred

Hello, 2019!! Now that we’ve put 2018 behind us it is time to focus on what will drive the future of customer experiences. While I know this is a little later than “normal” for a predictions posts, but it is still January so I’m calling it still fair game. While I’ve personally done these in the past this year I’ve asked some of my industry peers, really my friends that I’ve come to know via social media, met at conferences, etc. to share their opinions. I’ve tried to bring together a perspective from all facets of Customer Experience for this predictions post. From technology, social media, governance, engagement, customer service, and more. I hope you enjoy the fun exercise of predicting the future. So let’s dive in! First up, is Katylyn.

Social Media

Katelyn Brower

Digital Marketing Manager – Global Social Media & Employee Advocacy at Dun & Bradstreet
@BrowerKDnB
G

I am thrilled to see what is in store for us on social media in 2019. My prediction is that we will continue to see big things from Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn moving into the new year. In the areas of live video and analytics, brands will be able to strengthen relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and employees on social media.

Live Video: Instagram and Twitter already have the live video capability, but 2019 will be the year LinkedIn releases their own version of live video. LinkedIn Company Pages recently got a facelift, and the reasoning behind the new look and feel positions LinkedIn to add live video. Instagram should pull back focus on IGTV and look to merge the Stories and IGTV features, this can bring further advancements for Instagram Live. Twitter needs to continue progressing their live feature. I am a fan of newly added “live audio,” but video needs to mirror competitors like Instagram and make it easier for live hosts to interact with their audiences.

Analytics: As marketing continues to become more digital, marketers need to have better analytics to make key decisions and analyze performance. After Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, we started to see an advancement in the analytics provided for both personal and company pages. One thing we need to see in 2019 is the capability to export personal and brand data. Companies can do this via third-party tools, but the capability needs to come from LinkedIn directly. Twitter is on a mission to increase engagement and drive meaningful conversations, but in order to do that, they need to map out what those goals mean analytically – I hope to see more defined metrics from Twitter in 2019. If my prediction of Instagram merging stories and IGTV (dare to dream, right?!) comes true, then we need to see better analytics on stories and Instagram Live. With video, marketers need a better understanding of average time/percent watched – I predict Instagram to roll this out with all video options in 2019.

There’s a lot we can see from all 3 platforms next year, and while I hope it is all of my wants and desires, I know whatever comes out will help brands strengthen awareness and relationships.

Virtual Reality

Christoph Trappe

Chief Content Engagement Director
Stamats Business Media
@CTrappe

New types of content assets are worth trying. VR is one. Virtual reality is really an underused tool and partially that is because not all consumers have the headset. But given that you can watch virtual reality videos as 360 versions on a phone or app, and not very many events are using them yet, it’s the perfect time to jump right in and make this strategy a big differentiator for your company. You can now buy cameras for under $100 and they work!

Augmented Reality

Emily Smith

Digital Engagement Coordinator, Nelson Education
@EmilyRose780

In 2019, the line between the digital and the “real” will become less and less significant. As developments in the technology allow us to access, create, and share AR objects of our own with just our phones, AR will become more and more integrated into our everyday lives. We’ll use it for everything from buying Ikea furniture, to learning to count, learning to dance, and learning a language. This may be the year I’ll buy my first smart glasses. If I do, it will be because they’ll add value to my life not only through features like AR directions to new places, but because they’ll allow me to look up from my phone and have better interactions with the people around me. It’s my hope that AR developments will take us in that kind of social interaction direction in 2019. One thing we can all count on next year is that the amazing people working in augmented reality will surprise us. By this time next year when we’re making 2020 predictions, they’ll have come up with something that none of us have even dreamed of as of today.

Digital Policy & Governance

Kristina Podnar

Principal, NativeTrust Consulting, LLC
@Kpodnar

Digital transformation failures of the past several years and the recent shifts in data privacy awareness (driven by global laws & regulations) will cultivate new digital practices in 2019. We will see more rigor in digital strategies and the development of honed digital policies. This will ensure that marketing and operations are aligned with the organization’s perspective of digital opportunities and risks, which tactically translate into building of personal relationships and moving away from historical messaging around products and pricing.

Customer Service – Bots and AI

Al Hopper

Principal, Nagurra Networks
@alhopper_

I see 2019 as a year of internal changes for customer service, which will speed up the response times for customers working with agents. Companies are going to spend more money on continuing to improve agent access to knowledge bases through the use of improved search engines, or what some will call AI. This will enable agents to find answers quicker and in a more centralized and controlled manner. I also see decision bots being deployed for simpler tasks. An example of this is creating a bot logic to determine if a credit can be granted to a customer instead of having to escalate the request to a next level agent and waiting in queue for the answer. In some cases, these bots will be able to respond via chat or Messenger channels instead of engaging an agent at all, leaving the human agent to manage more complex concerns.

Mobile Disruption

Dio Favatas

Managing Director, Digital Marketing
Truth Initiative
@DioFavatas

My big prediction really is that 2019 will be the year of mobile disruption, and with 5G coming online, the media landscape, as well as smart cities and IoT/IIoT applications will finally come to fruition. And I believe the laptop/desktop is just about dead, and we’ll see renewed interest in tablets and phablets as alternatives.

My Prediction: Customer Experience Becomes a KPI

I love all the predictions of my friends. For my prediction, I believe that focus on customer experience will start to become a KPI that is measured at the highest level in an organization. We will take key metrics from different areas of our organizations from call centers to web to mobile to path-to-purchase and loyalty and use these to fuel a new KPI. I don’t know if this is a new measure of a NPS or something more complicated, but senior leadership will start to want to measure the totality of CX for their organization and how it impacts them.

So Where Will 2019 Take Us?

Take any industry and you will find the topics above are relevant. Technology is driving so much change in customer experience development that the ones we’ve been hearing about for years (AR/VR) will continue to come of age. New technology like 5G will enable more devices than ever to become part of the Internet of Things (IoT), and even more so with IIoT for manufacturers of all types of devices and machinery. Social media and the effectiveness of these channels for marketers will continue to be a staple with the increased consumption of video.

All of this won’t be effective for organizations without some rules of the road and governance. I think Kristina’s topic is one that is the unspoken part of any digital transformation and improvement of customer experiences. Finally, Al hits it on the head when it comes to customer interactions because after social media, a call center as a first line of defense for any brand. But how will bots and AI make this experience better? So let’s bring on 2019 and all its changes. One thing is for certain, everyone will be focusing on customer experience.

Last year Google released a pair of apps called Allo and Duo to address the messaging and video calling market. Many bemoaned yet another set of apps from Google instead of updating existing ones. With competition from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook), and iMessage by Apple, why did Google need yet another app. History of Google Hangouts and even their own Messenger app were not great. The special sauce in Allo that wasn’t in any of their other apps was their new digital assistant called Google Assistant.

Challenges with Conversion from Other Apps

Even with over 10M downloads of Allo as of December 2016, adoption has been a challenge. The first 5M of those was in the first five days. The second 5M was in the following months. The biggest issue is that if you want to really take advantage of it you need to have both parties using it. Even if it is on iOS and Android. When Allo first came out, I wondered how I would adopt it from using Google Hangouts for work and just plain Messenger for my phone. Because even if I used Allo as my primary messaging app, my recipients of messages would see my phone as some odd combination of letters and numbers as my “identity” to them. Let’s also just consider that older generations were not going to install a new app on their phone. Younger generation was and is still into WhatsApp and SnapChat. So we had non-starters right from the get go.

Missed Opportunity – Should Have Updated Messenger

So why didn’t Google just update Messenger, their default messaging app, to include Google Assistant? I don’t know. Maybe they needed/wanted a clean slate from a new codebase. Maybe there was some shared infrastructure between Allo and Duo. Regardless of the reason, it is a missed opportunity to update an existing app that had a large install base vs. requiring a new install. While Facebook had some success with this by pulling Facebook Messenger out of the native Facebook App, they had wide adoption of using the feature already. I know I held out downloading FB Messenger as a separate app. Now that I have it, I only use it occasionally. However, on a recent log in to communicate with a friend, a new Chatbot feature, “M” showed up and introduced itself to me. And here is where things get interesting.

ChatBots in Messaging Apps

So I’m a fan of Google Assistant which is essentially a chatbot. Especially since I have a Google Home already and I interact with Google Assistant every day at home. It is not a native application yet on my MotoX Pure Edition. You can only get Google Assistant on Pixel phones (soon to be others). Regardless of how Google is going about rolling out Google Assistant, Facebook just updated an existing app that is installed on millions of devices. Siri is already in all iPhones. Cortana…well yeah, it’s around. But Samsung is now introducing a digital assistant into their Galaxy phones with the Galaxy S8. The point is this, whether you call it a digital assistant or a chatbot, they are coming and they are going to be the “new” thing for consumers.

Google, you’ve missed an opportunity. I hope you can get it figured out. Maybe you need the premium hardware of the newer phones to get Google Assistant more widely adopted. Allo was a nice try, but it was dead out of the water by limiting its features. You would have been better off updating an existing installed app to bring new features than making users download yet another app. Here’s to hoping that the best part of Allo, Google Assistant, makes a bigger impact soon.