How important should mobile be in your company's overall strategy? Is it time to go full-bore or instead ease your way in? Are your customers ready for mobile, or will you waste your resources by devoting too much time to develop mobile apps for them?
Unless you're willing to spend big money, it can be tough to find answers to those questions. But a new report by Forrester offers some clues about how to find the answers yourself with quick estimates.
Measuring Mobile Readiness
The report details what Forrester calls the Mobile Mind Shift Index (MMSI), which, in Forrester's words, "measures how ready and eager your customers are for mobile engagement." Forrester bases the index on several scores: the Mobile Intensity Score, the Mobile Expectation Score, and three different Mobile Behavior Scores. All of the scores run from 0 (least mobile) to 100 (most mobile).Forrester has long experience in performing these kinds of calculations, and its report, "The New Mobile Mind Shift Index," has a wealth of details about how different kinds of customers rate. Overall it finds, unsurprisingly, that the most mobile customers tend to be younger than the general population.
The report makes for useful reading. But even without reading it, you can use its findings to help determine how ready your customers are for mobile, by doing rough calculations yourself.
Start with the Mobile Intensity Score. It measures whether it's time to invest in mobile. Survey your customers to find out how frequently they interact with their mobile devices, and also the diversity of places where they interact—at home, at work, while traveling and so on. A quick survey will tell you how ripe they are for mobile.
As part of the survey, figure out the Mobile Expectation Score, which tells how urgent it is that you develop for mobile quickly. This will be a bit trickier, because you won't be asking questions about their behavior, but instead about what they expect of your business—how quickly do they think you should be developing for mobile? The higher their expectations, the more quickly you need to act.
Finally, ask questions related to the Mobile Behavior Scores—how often do they text, email, read news, watch video, and buy via mobile. Once again, the more your customers do this, the more ready they are for you to develop mobile apps.
Know more details about the survey.
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