Top 3 Personalization Strategies for Non-Retail Applications

2014 was an incredibly exciting year for mobile apps. With a huge advantage of personalization that mobile apps offer over mobile websites, even the most well-known  brick-and-mortar stores have geared their attention to developing more mobile applications in 2015. Using these apps, these stores successfully leverage proximity functions like geolocation, push notifications, etc.  to deliver mesmerising personalized experiences to shoppers, who so obsessively clutch their smartphones these days.

Many personalization platforms today emphasize primarily on retail mobile apps. But non-retail mobile apps can also keep their user community engaged. Read this post further to explore the different personalization strategies that work greatly for non-retail apps.

Many developers feel reluctant to dive into creating apps for non-retail businesses fearing from the exercise of collecting humongous customer data and developing big algorithms. Nevertheless, it’s a myth that we will debunk in this post.

Here are the top 3 personalization strategies for non-retail content.

1. Geolocation content

This is one of the great ways to personalize content. As majority of smartphones have in-built geolocation features, you can easily target users with newsfeed and even connect them with other users in proximity with same interests. One of the brilliant examples to quote here is that of iBeacon that enables mobile apps with its Bluetooth Low Energy technology to understand the location well and deliver relevant and contextual content to user based on location.

2. Recommendations

The better you understand a customer, the better and more educated recommendations, you can offer to your customers/online store visitors. You can extract useful information from your customers during the sign up process or even later interactions with your website. You can use this information for effective customer profiling when they start downloading and using your mobile app. You can track your customers across:

• User sign up process
• Browsing history
• User generated content like tweets, comments, favorites, likes, etc.
• User preferences
• Ratings and reviews

Once you’ve these data points, you can design a better user experience for your customers. Using the user feedback when they browse through your mobile app, you can refine your app further.

3. UGC

Often, etailers commit the blooper of looking upon personalization as a duty to deliver user experience. Personalization also entails the content and contribution of users to shopping environment. While you take all the necessary steps to offer personalization such as collecting customer data, monitoring their interactions with your ecommerce website and accordingly offer relevant and contextual product recommendations to them. You can let users contribute to your personalization strategy through a mobile application. Your private labelled application can serve as a powerful platform for users to connect and engage with your brand, pitch their opinion and experience. This will empower your users to generate their own personalized content and experience.

Let’s take the example of Gaana.com app, a beautifully designed mobile application that makes it easy for users to discover music from the best collection of national and international playlists. Here users take the music listening experience to a new level by creating/modifying playlists depending on their genres/moods.

Such mobile apps enable users to feel valued and ask for their contribution to make it more interesting a platform to visit and revisit to generate more user generated content and get their varied needs addresses on the online platform. It offers them highly personalized experiences.

Enterprise Mobility: Is it a Winning Proposition in 2015?

For years, enterprise mobility was related to email, some flashy apps and corporate-issued devices. And during this phase, most organizations considered mobile as simply an extension of the desktop. But now with corporate mobility momentum picking up, companies are beginning to realize the potential of mobile more strategically by understanding varied business contexts and embracing a persona-guided approach. This evolved mobile approach addresses the needs of all user profiles effectively inside (better employee productivity) and outside (better customer engagement) the organization.

Let’s have a look at what Mary Meeker (also dubbed as the “Queen of the Net”) has to say about mobile internet usage. As per her recent predictions, mobile internet usage is picking up noticeably faster than desktop internet usage did and by 2015, “more users will connect to the internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” Businesses that will catch up on this trend will win, and those that overlook it will lose.

Mobility isn’t just an add-on capability; it’s much more than that. It encompasses apps, and devices, software platforms, architectures and databases. As an enterprise, you can’t continue with your piecemeal methodology for managing the mobile environment any longer. Since every persona (employees, customers and partners) represents a unique context, the mobility needs are diverse.

The IBM survey of 600 companies across 29 countries unravels an astonishing fact – only 50% of the companies (with more than $500 million in annual revenues) have comprehensive, strong mobile strategies in place to address the challenge of mobility implementation and leverage mobile opportunities fully. Enterprises, should, therefore start looking at mobility through a persona-centric lens and adopt a holistic mobile business model to drive high performance and gain competitive advantage.

Out with the Old

Mobile revolution has completely gripped the IT landscape and blended into nearly every aspect of your business. This ubiquity of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices and consumerization of IT have urged enterprises to adapt to a dynamic environment in which they need to support employees, customers and partners – all with unique set of mobile requirements. Hence, it’s critical for organizations to incorporate all key drivers of mobility into their strategy to optimize the required business functions and applications.

Enterprise (B2B and B2E) vs. Consumer mobile applications

Technology and market forces are the two important factors that drive enterprise mobility. With enterprise mobility focusing on front-user interfacing apps, many brands have switched on from traditional emailing to addressing the end user’s mobility needs with persona-based mobility solutions.

With multiple mobile personas for enterprises to handle, enterprises have a gargantuan task of crafting mobile strategies and applications for different platforms and programming languages.  44% of U.S. enterprises are mainly focused on building mobile applications for native devices (e.g., iOS, Android, Microsoft), and 39% that are focused on mobile web development.

To address the mobility needs of each persona, enterprises need to understand the various user profiles and their relationships and behaviors w.r.t different business processes (like talent management, sales, delivery, etc.) and subsets. There is a huge difference in developing and deploying mobile capabilities for enterprise-based and consumer-based relationships.

 

 

 

 

 

Enterprise Mobile Applications

• Not commonly found in app stores; most enterprises get their own apps built
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Utilitarian; simplify the business processes
• Loaded with ultimate security features (passwords, encryption/decryption, MDM)
• Native or cross platform (facilitating BYOD) compatible mobile apps
• Focus on boosting employee collaboration and productivity, targeted marketing
• g., CRM apps, marketing and analytic apps, sales force automation, collaboration apps, technical computing apps, payroll apps, etc.

Consumer Mobile Applications

• Easily available in app stores
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Packed with emotional designs to attract customers
• Loaded with generic functions and data
• Standalone app or integrated to a backend
• g., Social-based applications, combined mobility applications, geo-mapping services, edutainment apps, mobile wallet, etc.

Google Beware! Here comes Siri…..

Apple’s voice assistant Siri, an exclusive feature of iPhone 4

It’s not Apple’s first foray into the voice-activated controls and speech-recognition realm, yet the best attempt so far. It seems so.

For those of you who are clueless about Siri, it’s time to get introduced to speech-recognition “personal assistant” , inbuilt in Apple iPhone 4S smartphones, unveiled last month. Don’t get mistaken for Siri isn’t an app. So, you can’t download it in a click from any App store. Nor is it any icon on the menu which you can tap on your iPhone.

Siri: All set to steal Internet searchers from Google

Siri is a speech-recognition computer software. It’s your new friend right in your pocket, who can speak to you or who you can speak to. It has already succeeded in capturing the eyeballs of tech watchers.

But why does Google need to be alert? Can Siri eat into Google like a Moth? Or is the media simply yammering about this young virtual assistant at full blow? Is Siri free of all backlashes?

Well, just like everything Siri too isn’t perfect but can be a great game changer. At least, for Google, that considers Siri as a completely novel approach to search technology and even the biggest threat to Google search control.

What cements this suspicion? The usage of Siri has been 10 times more than what even Apple had expected.

Siri, a voice-controlled virtual personal assistant, based on artificial intelligence.

One of the experts, Morgenthaler, is of the opinion that even one right answer from Siri holds more significance than a million search links from Google. And, if it starts getting more and more used to bypass search then Google can be in deep trouble.

Siri sets Google blindsided

With its beta version out, Siri tech titans are already busy supplementing its artificial-intelligence knowledge base with varied streams of user data. Siri is on a roll, guys!

Some have even gone to the extent of pitching their anticipation that Siri will successfully ape human beings in performing tasks in another couple of years. The real twist of the game would be if the Big Daddy Apple opens its API to third-party developers.

The new speech engine, Siri, certainly has a clear technological edge.

If this happens, I repeat if this happens, Android is most likely to suddenly disappear from the race. Why? The answer is obvious. In dearth of apt response to artificial intelligence competence, Google can bite the dust since mass developer mobilization to Apple can be witnessed as this brain child of Sir Steve Jobs focuses on developing some ‘out-of-the-box’, cool apps.

Apple vs. Google..Who will win?

You don’t need to speak like a robot as you do on Google since Siri permits  natural language interaction and applies logic. And, the users get the treat of human-like experiences and engagement level. Not only does it provide you with a blue link, but also navigates you to transactions, which you need to confirm. And, it’s done! It, therefore, saves your lot of time and effort.

It’s the future of search.

Hey all you techie friends, do let me know your insights on this.

Why Should You Buy a Smartphone? Indeed, the finest invention ever!

Smartphones available on cheapest prices, Diwali Loot-Cheap Smartphones deals, etc. etc. etc.!!

Your eyes might be weary of seeing such advertisements in print, digital or electronic media. However, many of us still might not be acquainted well with our new friends in the telecom market.

Smartphones--the hottest growth category today

You might be contented with your regular feature phone like my folks, who are simply happy to receive and disconnect calls or who even go to the extent of ignoring SMSes thinking that any bulk-SMS sending company might have remembered them since they committed the sin of once registering with those websites. But now is the time to move ahead, and be a part of smartphones revolution.

Smartphones are really COOL, and you can also afford one without creating a hole in your pocket. Trust me on this one, friends.

Why I’ve bought a smartphone is a different story altogether. How could I see my fractious neighbor with whom I share such frosty relations flaunting her LG Optimus 3D smartphone? To tame her tantrums, I bought a superior one.

Anyways, let me focus back on the topic.

Well, I recommend smartphones or rather the newest “entertainment devices” to each one of you. I’m advocating these useful devices not because any manufacturer has hired me for the marketing of their smartphones, but owing to the varied captivating features of these mobile devices, the finest representatives of modern digital culture.

Let's make smartphones an integral part of our daily lives

You’d be astonished to know that though we currently have a mobile user population of over 890.2 million in India, smartphone user population accounts only for 1% of this i.e., 9—10 million users. Mobile phone usage is now no more limited to mere calling and messaging. These activities have been replaced with browsing and social networking. Kudos to Sir Steve Jobs for gifting us smartphones and changing the way we had been using our mobile devices!

What sets smartphones class apart from the feature phones are some distinguishing features. Let’s pick apart the corpse of feature phones, and see how smartphones are really smarter than these. Scalpel?

How smartphones hold opinion(s) about each other

Operating systems such as iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows7 etc. manufactured primarily by Big Daddies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are available on a wide range of handsets. Whereas, the regular feature phone that you’ve been using until now is based on a language-specific OS. This implies that you have seamless access to a wide array of best-grade applications regardless of the handset you’re using if it has the same version of OS.

Smartphones--Multi-taking has never been so easy before!

Now, let me touch my favorite feature of smartphones—the magical world of applications. The eco-systems of smartphones offer haven for huge scores of apps across varied spaces like utility, social networking, news, entertainment, music, games etc. However, the feature phones are limited in their capacity to run different apps and dearth of processing potential.

If you’re a multi-tasker, then you’ve a reason to smile. Smartphones can eventually prove to be your best buddies in boosting your efficiency by helping you in multi-tasking. Music player, calculator, adrenaline-pumping games, camera, utility, social networking, navigation, emails, weather, dictionary, podcasting. What more can you ask for? However if you still wish to stick to feature phones, then it’s better you stay glued to the idea of attending one task at a time.

Gift from Sir Steve Jobs to all of us

Coming to an important aspect that cannot be overlooked when we draw comparisons between the two breeds of mobile devices—Software updates. Both operating system architects and handset manufacturers update the smartphones regularly, while feature phones seldom get these updates. So, you can keep enriching your smartphone with added functionalities.

Last but certainly not the least, the factor that attracts the eyeballs of all gadget geeks and common man, alike. That’s price. Today due to the emergence of group-buying websites in the picture, you can easily get access to many sophisticated smartphones like, Samsung Galaxy Y S5360, Spice Mi310 at much lower prices as compared to high-end feature phones.

Smartphone applications are now a massively used DIGITAL commodity

Now that I’m done with my duty to convince you to get introduced to the new space of entertainment right in your hand, what are you waiting for? Pad up to fly high in the sky of digitally charged entertainment sky studded with stars like Apple iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S II, HTC HD7 etc.