App fatigue and seamless personalization

Going back to Gartner’s prediction that 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps by 2019. (Sidenote: I hope they abandon them the same way Warner Bros. abandoned its original website for the movie Space Jam. It’s a beautiful time capsule of 1996, and I pray it never changes. But I digress.)

Forrester Research, as quoted in Chris Nierney’s recent piece on HPE’s  enterprise.nxt blog, writes that “consumer app fatigue is forcing digital business professionals to offer a portfolio of mobile experiences that go beyond apps and depend on ecosystem partners, [to] pull mobile in-house [and to] operate as a collection of synced agile teams building better customer experiences.”

Nierney translates that to mean that consumers are demanding a seamless and personalized mobile experience that spans platforms and devices. He expects more enterprises to follow the model of eBay 4.0, which offers customers an integrated, customizable, and personalized experience across all devices.

And what’s good for enterprises is good for CSPs, who still have significant ground to cover in the realm of seamless and personalized experiences—both from a technological standpoint and in terms of the overall customer experience. Having seamless digital interaction with my devices is great, but I would also be happy with getting a unified experience between my wireless carrier’s retail store and its website. (Which is not to pick on wireless CSPs. We live in an age of great wonders, but I still have to call my Internet provider every six months when my promotional pricing runs out and do the whole elevation song and dance if I want to save a few bucks.)

Life-mobile convergence

But these trends are just small parts of the picture. The mobile experience continues to melt into not only the wider communications landscape, but into every aspect of our daily lives. Smart and careful CSPs are figuring out how to do more, faster and more securely. It’s up to the rest of us to help them get there.