There has always been an interesting argument for diversity in application offerings on new customer channels or platforms. Although the past methodologies for designing products have been to focus on one and serve it in a working, practical and robust manner to your customer, the value of one product per channel has been somewhat diluted over the years with the convergence of so many industries, and we see it most clearly where retail and banking have converged. Customers like having different products offered through a single service or channel from both retail and banking, iow they want to buy things when they are on the bank platform and they want to bank when they are on the retail platform (virtually speaking of course).
In an e-business this to me then has become the trend, as opposed to the exception, but it still surprises me when clients battle to understand that their single product offering will not necessarily be enough to draw customers to their platform, and none more so than financial services clients. Customers no longer want to visit your site and do only your service offering. They go to sites where there is a sense of community married with a sense of responsible assistance that has all the popular tweaks to it, but focused around one core service offering, as this is what brings them back on a recurring basis.
You can argue that a beautiful website around your one product or service offering brings in traffic, but I would ask how much does the beauty of your site or presence bring them back again after the initial visit. It is in recurring use that we find success online and even more so on the mobile phone. Now we come to the crux of the matter for me, offering services or products over a mobile platform, where this multiple service offering is crucial or it will fail. I think there is some important to allowing customers access to their accounts for mobile transactions from time to time, but that also states the obvious that they do so ‘from time to time’. It is this infrequent use of the mobile banking platform at the current time that has be review how I see its design and its function.
Mobile banking or transaction offerings must be done in collaboration with other products and or services to ensure regular use of the platform and more frequent revenues per head. I think with the era of mobile technology having arrived with great gusto one has to seriously look at your own offering and review how it is a customer perceives your product. If Web2.0 taught us anything it is that people like to drive their own destinies on the Internet, they like to feel that they too can shape their favorite services with their own input, creativity and content from time to time. We lack this spontaneity in our product designs for transaction based businesses like banking, and we treat the mobile platform as a small sideshow to the core offering, possibly losing an entire generation of mobile savvy youngsters who were not introduced to the Internet via a browser but via a phone instead. Designing flexible products then that can offer them all kinds of teasers and attractions along with the ability to bank when they need to must therefore be a priority for us as engineers. Making applications that present more to them than virtual versions of a bank branch and all its boring trappings, should be our focus.
Mobile banking and financial services platforms or offerings should be enjoyable and we should be designing to attract customers on a regular basis even if it is not for a core service transaction, as on the mobile phone all interactions can generate revenue. Therefore we should build our solutions to cater to the various users in a flexible manner, changing its format depending on who logs in on the phone, using a powerful delivery platform to deliver this flexible service if our own technology is not able to do this, and to allow their customers to have fun on the client’s platform regardless their intent.
New Ideas Consulting 