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Making Mobile Better With Contextual Right-time Experiences

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Making Mobile Better With Contextual Right-time Experiences Successful mobile strategies focus on improving existing processes as well as using mobile to deliver products, services and experiences that weren’t previously possible. These new experiences use technologies such as mobile, cloud computing and analytics to create competitive advantage. In the John Wiley and Sons book, “Right-time Experiences – Delivering Value with Mobile and Big Data”, Lopez defined right-time experiences as products, services, and workflows that offer a person the right information and services at the point of need or desire, regardless of device.

Mobility obviously plays a key role in delivering right-time experiences. Building a successful mobile application strategy requires companies to use all of the features and context that mobile can provide. Sensors within these devices provide a foundation for contextual services. New navigation methods such as voice, touch and pens provide new ways to interact with applications. Meanwhile, connectivity provides a way to consume these services anywhere.

One mobile strategy challenge companies suffer from is understanding what context is and how it may manifest itself in an application. Not everyone needs or wants the same thing when using an application. Given that reality, context becomes both interesting and useful. Who is the person using the application? What time is it? Where is he or she? When did he visit in the past? What is he viewing or doing at this moment, and how does it relate to what he’s recently done? All this contextual information can help the organization deliver the most meaningful, rewarding, and worthwhile experience.

Successful companies will deliver more compelling experiences by collecting and analyzing contextual data such as location, time of day, previous transactions, and device type. Sensors in the latest devices also furnish physical context, such as temperature, humidity, motion, and more. These data sources provide situational and environmental information about people, places, and things. By

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understanding an individual’s current situation and previous history, a business can anticipate her immediate needs and offer experiences appropriate for the individual’s situation.

Most businesses have made limited use of context and customer records to date, but the collection and analysis of contextual data will supply the foundation for leading mobile apps that deliver right-time experiences.

The Four Types Of Mobile Right-time Experiences

Many companies associate context with consumer advertising such as push notifications for sales. However, right-time experiences are contextual services that encompass far more than precisely tailored advertising messages. They expand to involve products and processes that meet the distinctive needs of different constituents:

• Business to consumer (B2C). The right information and services to live a richer, fuller life.

• Business to employee (B2E). The right information to perform efficiently and effectively at work.

• Business to partners (B2P). The right information and services to build a viable business ecosystem between companies.

• Things to things (T2T) and things to people (T2P). The right information sent from a connected device to a business system for automating tasks (for example, an alert from your basement to your smartphone says you have a leak in the basement). Sensors in things can also communicate with individuals to provide information about how the device is functioning (for example, an alert from the HVAC system tells the building manager to order and install new air filters).

Using Context To Improve Your Mobile Apps

Mobile applications should offer right-time experiences. Context is an essential element of any mobile application development strategy. However, many people

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think of context only as location: Where exactly is this employee, this customer, this package, this truck, or this container right now? Location is one of the most important contextual elements but not the only element. There are many other types of contextual elements, such as device type, transaction history, and time of day. Device type can be used to understand whether the device has a big or a small screen, and the application or web page can respond with the appropriate amount of text or imaging to fill the screen.

Transaction history may mean an opportunity to cross-sell—or to demand payment on delivery. Time of day means marketers can send different types of messages at the times when they are most likely to be read and acted upon.It’s worth noting that smartphones and wearables are the most contextual devices that ever existed. Before we had these devices, we didn’t have enough information to create contextual services. Today, even a low-end smartphone can capture multiples types of contextual information.

If we ask our customers, prospects and employees to opt in, we have the opportunity to understand how people are using applications and services on a device. People will opt in for services that make their lives better and improve their everyday experiences. Social networks are an ideal example of how consumers are willing to exchange information, such as location and photos, for the value of communicating more efficiently with friends and loved ones.

There are at least nine types of contextual elements that organizations should consider incorporating into their business processes to deliver right-time experiences. These include, but are not limited to, location, time, and current process. Let’s investigate what each of these elements and how context can improve your mobile applications.

Location

Right-time experiences mean providing different services based on knowing if the user is at home, in the mall, at the office, or at a customer’s site. Multiple types of location technologies—triangulation, Bluetooth, wireless location signatures (WLS), and GPS—may be combined to locate both people and things.

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Companies can use location data to create a geofence, a sensor-based virtual boundary around physical spaces, such a business, a mall, or a sporting venue. A business owner or manager has the opportunity to trigger communications and automate tasks based on a person entering or exiting the geofenced area. location can also be used to automate how people access their applications and services. For example, software in mobile operating system learns when and where you use different apps and can place them on your phone’s lock screen for easy access. At home it may surface the smart lock app but surface your calendar and document management app when you enter your office.

Lets look at how this might also be used in a business to employee example. If an employee enters the geofence, a workflow could be initiated or a message delivered. A construction firm, for example, can link a mobile device’s location to a timekeeping system to automatically log when a worker enters or leaves the work site.

Time

Creating an optimal experience frequently requires understanding the time of day. An experience that is welcomed at breakfast (for example, a business news summary) is a distraction during a customer meeting. While right-time experiences benefit from real-time data, they do not have to be in real time but can happen at the moment of need or at a specific time of day. An individual may desire different services or communications based on the time of day. She may need traffic conditions and school closing information before breakfast. The exact same information can be useless by lunchtime. The definition of the right time can vary based on a person’s behavior. Someone who works the night shift will arguably engage with services at a different time than someone who works from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Companies can employ time data in conjunction with data about an individual’s previous behaviors to understand the optimal type of communication and the optimal time to deliver it. A grocery store, for example, may send a text message

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at five o’clock to alert a commuting customer that the rotisserie chicken he’s bought in the past is on sale.

Another dimension of time is based on providing the right information or service at the optimal moment. The optimal time for a communication or service relates to reacting to a change in situation. The director of sales, for example, wants to be alerted of a large customer win or loss before she enters a meeting with management. Truckers can use real-time traffic data in applications to reduce the time they spend in traffic, waiting for an open loading dock, and being on the road.

Current Process and Action

Process helps determine the flow of transaction and what information, product, or service may be most valuable in the context of completing that process or action. People frequently start and stop processes and workflows. Many processes aren’t finished and are abandoned altogether because someone doesn’t have enough information.

Right-time experiences will require businesses to link data across systems so the user has the right information at the point of need. For example, a procurement manager who is ordering a large quantity of a specific supply would want to know if the product is out of stock, whether the product’s price will change before the order is approved, and what alternatives may be available. Before approving an employee’s vacation request, a manager should know who’s already on vacation and what job functions will need to be filled in the employee’s absence.

Other times, a person may have started a process but doesn’t want to go through the motions of completing the entire process over again from scratch. One thing the web world and e-commerce have taught us is the concept of maintaining persistence of a process across time. If you were interrupted during an online shopping process, many websites will save the items in your shopping cart in the hope that you will return. If you are signed in to a website, the site may send you an email reminder that you abandoned your cart and the items are still available.

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One of the benefits of mobile is that you can accomplish a task when you are away from your home or office. However, a person may only have a few moments to complete a transaction. Delivering a right-time experience means that a person starts a transaction at one time and finishes at a later time when it’s more convenient. For example, a person might start a product refund request while in line for a coffee but need to complete the process at a different time. In an ideal world, a person would be able to return to the app and pick up exactly where they left off. Building a right-time experience will require a company to create this concept of persistence across a wide range of devices and processes.

Device Type, Device State, and Presence

Right-time experiences should recognize and adapt to the user’s device and the quality of the network. The software should automatically adjust how it presents the information based on the screen size and what navigation methods (touch, voice, gesture) are available.

Given that people will be moving around with more than one connected device, device presence will highlight what a person is using at that moment. Presence will span across devices to include nontraditional devices such as cars, wearables, conference rooms, and videoconferencing equipment. A right-time experience can be as simple as using your smartphone to find out what conference rooms actually have people sitting in them versus what conference rooms have been reserved.

Right-time experiences will also make use of device type capabilities (e.g., video, touch screen, accelerometers). For example, expense account software should sense the presence of a camera and prompt the user to photograph receipts. A simple but powerful use of device context is understanding if a device’s battery is charged and modifying the application functions to conserve battery life.

New functions such as visual search, 3D imaging and voice commands will change what types of experiences companies can offer on new smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

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Social and Behavioral

Behavioral context will help a business decide the next best action based on how the employee or customer has behaved in the past. One customer always responds to coupons for jeans, for example. One salesperson always opens her customer relationship software to the follow-up screen. Right-time experiences will learn how individuals routinely use their services and create preferences based on these behaviors and user-defined attributes.

Environmental Conditions

New IoT devices offer embedded sensors that will provide environmental conditions to context-aware applications and services. Types of environmental context could include air quality, temperature, humidity, and weather forecast. For example, a transportation company can use sensors in trucks to ensure the delivery of fresh produce on time by monitoring temperature and humidity during the delivery process. Connected sensors will be used by many industries, with utility, oil, and gas industries leading the way. In the future, a utility technician could use a device’s sensor to tell if there is a gas leak in the building before entering it, and airport security could scan for hazardous toxins.

The agriculture and transportation industries are already using weather data to decide when to plant or how to route trucks around snowstorms in the Midwest. Other, less obvious industries will also use weather information. Public utility companies need to monitor extremes in weather to ensure they are prepared to deliver sufficient electricity or gas to the population. Commodity traders make a number of decisions based on weather data. A freeze in Florida is likely to affect the price of citrus or crops, for example.

Roles and Social Relationships

Individuals play different roles among a wide variety of relationships. By combining and analyzing data from social networks and documents or

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information a person has shared, companies can understand how people feel about their personal and work experiences.

In the consumer landscape, there is a wide range of data being shared in public social networks. Companies are mining sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to understand what topics people are interested in, how they feel about products, and how individuals are related to one another. Interest-based social networks, such as Pinterest and Houzz, are visual discovery tools that you can use to find ideas for home projects or other interests such as fashion ideas. These interest-based social networks provide even methods for collecting both individual preferences (personal context) and market trends (group sentiment).

In the business world, the same concept of roles and relationships applies. Today roles are defined by your job function. Within the organization, companies will use information from enterprise social business and collaboration tools to evaluate existing team structures, roles, and responsibilities. For example, a company could link its contact center solution to social software to discover hidden experts and content within the firm’s collaboration systems.

A firm can discover an employee’s or customer’s current needs and uncover latent desires. Understanding how an individual feels about an issue will help brands and organizations build services that are better suited to a customer’s or employee’s actual needs. Businesses can use sentiment analysis services to improve business processes, customer care, and existing products today.

Motion

The presence or lack of motion can be used to define if and how an experience should proceed. For example, a connected medicine bottle cap, can sense when a patient last opened the bottle and will send reminders if the patient forgets to take the medication. Sensors in the latest devices provide environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity as well as magnetometers and accelerometers for direction and orientation. Companies can use this data to monitor corporate asset health and improve service uptime. For example, motion

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sensors in machinery could transmit alerts to headquarters to schedule maintenance and prevent unplanned outages.

Companies are shifting from selling physical products to equipment uptime as a service by collecting and analyzing high volumes of sensor data to predict product performance and maintenance needs and to avoid unplanned downtime in industrial equipment such as turbines, jet engines, and locomotives.

Summary In short, context matters! Right-time experiences shouldn’t require customers or employees to change their behavior to enjoy a better experience. Context provides the situational awareness that doesn’t exist in today’s transactions. Situational awareness moves us from transactional processes with limited insight to meaningful engagement. Using the contextual elements outlined above, a business can assess intent, which helps it anticipate a customer’s or an employee’s future behavior. Contextual services will pull in a multitude of data points, use analytics to make sense of this data, and present individuals with a set of options for how to act or react.

Many businesses are already adding a single element of context, such as location, into business processes. Companies should enhance these products with additional layers of context to create more valuable and unique experiences. The best right-time experiences will combine information from different sources, such as time, location, and schedule, to improve an interaction.

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