Is It the End of the Road for Mobile Apps?
Infobip is a Business Reporter client.
The role of mobile apps as a primary interface between consumers and businesses is shifting away from walled gardens to more flexible OTT environments.
While Covid has accelerated the importance of mobile and contactless experiences, consumer behavior over the past five years suggests that the mobile app is no longer the gateway to a better customer experience.
For most customer-facing enterprises, some of the most sought-after real-estate is on customers’ smartphone screens, making it a hotly contested arena. However, apps are looking increasingly redundant, even at a time when all businesses are digitally transforming to meet the needs of today’s connected consumers.
For brands to have any hope of growing their mobile market share with loyal, long-term customers, not only do they need to capture consumers’ attention, but they also need to ensure that clients and shoppers are being served in places convenient to them—which no longer seems to be inside an app.
The average person has 40 apps installed on their phone, but 89% of their time is split between just 18 of them. That means less than 50% of installed apps are being actively used—so brands that are dependent on in-app comms to engage with customers are likely not performing too well.
Simply put, customers don’t think in channels, so neither should brands.
Global research on smartphone users indicates that the majority of respondents have a clear preference for receiving communications from organizations and service providers via email (46%), SMS (24%) and phone (24%)—suggesting that today’s consumers want to communicate with brands via multiple channels and through methods convenient to them.
By comparison, the use of established social media platforms’ in-app messaging applications for engagement is relatively low, at 11% to 12%. If popular social channels are not being used to communicate through the app with hosts, it’s no surprise that less well-established brands in other verticals such as retail or hospitality struggle to engage through this channel.
Similarly,research by a mobile consultancy has uncovered a number of significant customer pain points specifically around mobile transactions, which partly explains why people are increasingly eschewing mobile apps in favor of other methods to interact with brands. The research shows that things like mandatory app installs to try a service before being able to make a purchase are viewed by end users as annoying barriers to consumption rather than fast routes to gratification.
While global data shows that people do still download apps (230 billion were downloaded in 2020, it also shows that they just as quickly delete them, often after just a single use; the uninstall rate jumped significantly in 2020 compared to 2019.
This is bad news for app-first brands, which are not only missing out on revenue growth opportunities, but also alienating customers for the long term.
Going forward, companies must find solutions that look at engagement through the lens of the customer. Omnichannel mobile marketing and digital contact center models are key to addressing this change in customer behavior and expectations, offering consumers the personalized experiences they love while enabling businesses to differentiate themselves from the pack through exceptional customer experience. It’s a world away from the closed mobile app environment.
With large tech providers streaming single-use apps to your phone or actively nudging developers to store parts of their apps in the cloud, together with evidence that customers prefer the immediacy of chat apps to engage and buy from brands, we may have just entered the beginning of a future where installation becomes obsolete and the border between websites and native apps is blurred. This is a future without apps, and it promises to be one of ultimate simplicity and elegance.
—Maria Carrelli Vice President of Marketing, Infobip
This article originally appeared on Business Reporter.
Header image credit: iStock id493061420 Author headshot image credit: Courtesy of Infobip
