Photo Credit: Disappointed by Tamir Khason

Mobile Commerce, and Mobile Banking in particular, uses a lot of complicated technology.

It’s hard, but your customers don’t care. Your customers just want to connect with you on their mobile phone.

Your customer is just sitting at a stoplight and has thought about you and needs to do business in 20 seconds or less.

You have a dilema:

• Do you pick a platform and serve those customers (“The Chosen Ones”) really well, ignoring the rest?
• Do you go for a lowest common denominator solution that serves all your customers equally bad?
• Do you tailor solutions for individual platforms and invest a lot of resources in maintaining multiple solutions?

Almost every organization considering mobile has to make these critical decisions. Customers feel alienated when they respond to your marketing blitz and find out they’re not part of the select few you targeted. Meanwhile, it’s almost worse than doing nothing if your user experience isn’t great. You DO NOT want to be the banks at the bottom of this recent mobile banking report card.

Waiting isn’t an option either. Customers generally aren’t telling companies they’re doing business elsewhere because of mobile. They’re just going. Waiting isn’t likely to help anyway. Historically, mobile continues to become more and more fragmented. Waiting just means you’ll have less experience and less of a competitive advantage.

What do you do?

It depends. Like a chilly pool, it’s probably just best to jump in and deal with it. It’ll get better. But that doesn’t mean you should jump in without a plan. Every organization has its own unique circumstances. In general, it’s probably best to do a bit of everything. That’s what the banks at the top of that report card did.

Not all companies can do a number of projects at once. In fact, many of the companies with multiple approaches, quietly built, piloted and tested their systems through multiple iterations before doing the big media blitz. The “Fast Followers” probably don’t have that luxury.

The best thing to do is probably to find someone (like me) that’s been there to help you. Then, jump in.

Mobile Banking in the US is table stakes. Period.

Maybe five bankers out of the last thousand I’ve spoken to would disagree. We’re now at a point where many banks have rolled out their initial mobile banking implementations and real users have adopted mobile banking.

Now what?

Now it’s time for mobile banking to grow up. Bankers now are faced with managing the mobile channel and growing its importance to the bank and to consumers.

Increasing adoption is certainly on the minds of many bankers. Mobile banking has to pay for itself and strong adoption is required. Most bankers are not satisfied with mobile banking adoption. They may be pleased with where they are so far, but few bankers would be comfortable if adoption were to level off.

Frankly, most implementations are still in the low single digits of adoption as compared to online banking users. Adoption at many institutions would drop below 1% if it were to be measured against the overall number of bank customers (very few banks will talk publicly about their adoption rates).

Do you support all your customers or just smartphone users,  SMS users, online bankers, or some smaller subset? Do employees in your branches use mobile banking? Can branch staff help users sign up? Can they even talk intelligently about mobile banking?

Innovation and evolution don’t stop with adoption. Banks spend millions in online banking analytics and web site redesigns to encourage more profitable activities by consumers. Getting mobile in place is just the beginning. Banks need to figure out what works for their consumers and what doesn’t and what to do about it.

Banks will spend millions this year in promoting mobile banking to their consumers. Banks will then find that many mobile features need significant improvement. Banks and vendors alike will need to do more work to determine what works and what doesn’t in the user experience and in the feature set.

Unfortunately, the risk is that users that try mobile and don’t like it will be doubly hard to convince to try again later. User Experience is vitally important. I think mobile user experience is even more important because users tend to use mobile apps in small chunks like checking a balance and paying a bill. It takes a lot of hard work to distill features down in to usable bite-sized chunks that can be done at a stoplight. (Although, I am not encouraging use while driving).

So you have mobile banking, how are you going to get 90% adoption?

“A half-done, hard-to-use solution with limited features certainly says something about you. It’s probably not what you want your customers to hear.”

Mobile Commerce is commerce. Mobile Banking is banking.

Too many organizations overlook this simple truth and instead treat mobile as a simple feature add-on to their web solution. They do so at their peril.

Done right, mobile is not a simple technology decision, but a business expansion. For example, a successful mobile banking rollout certainly includes Technology and Information Security teams, but it also touches Marketing, Retail Banking, Banking Operations, and in some cases, Commercial banking. Rolling out mobile banking is a great excuse to touch your customers through bank statements, courtesy calls, print and mass media advertising, signage in your branches, user education events, etc.

Your customers will see your mobile option as an extension of your brand and a statement about who you are. A half-done, hard-to-use solution with limited features certainly says something about you. It’s probably not what you want your customers to hear.

Look around the internet. There are few if any press releases on the success of mobile sites that simply refactored their web site into a mobile site.

How successful can your mobile commerce site be if you can’t buy anything?

Successful mobile initiatives start with the overall business goals, then they figure out how mobile can help achieve those goals. Technically, this usually involves figuring out how to translate your connection with your customer into the mobile context.

For example, Facebook announced today they have 65 million mobile users. Despite some early usability issues, the application is encouraging more engagement and more users to join, which drives revenue. Facebook focused on the key use cases of status updates and wall posts. These chunks of functionality fit well into the mobile context and made Facebook easier to use because members didn’t have to remember their witty comment until they got back to their computer – they just typed it when the thought about it and moved on.

Similarly, Bank of America has seen tremendous success in their mobile banking application by focusing on getting key functionality to the most users possible. In Bank of America’s case, this meant offering a variety of mobile banking products.

Similarly, USAA recently announced success with its mobile remote deposit feature. USAA announced that users deposited over $1.5 million in the first days after the service launched. Mobile deposits are important to USAA because the bank doesn’t operate a large retail branch network and their customers are spread around the world. Mobile deposits bring more deposits into the bank and encourage customers to choose their USAA account as their primary account rather than an account from another bank or credit union.

The mobile image you project is increasingly the image your customers see. Make a good impression.

Mobile User Experience matters, and most organizations are getting it wrong.

Like marketing, the look, feel, flow, and functionality of an any application is an intangible that organizations are tempted to skimp on when pressed for time, budget, or both. Similarly, a flawed user experience is likely to be as bad for business as a flawed (or absent) marketing plan. Also like marketing, user experience can be measured but the results sometimes are dismissed.

“The Mobile User Experience is Miserable” says Jakob Nielsen a respected Mobile User Experience expert in a July 2009 study, “It’s neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices. Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.”

Executives, Programmers, and project managers all tend to focus on reducing scope and getting the product out the door. Many of us wrap ourselves in constraints (read: excuses) as to why suggested user interface changes won’t work. The code technically works, we’re behind schedule, and we’re losing money. Ship it!

So, the fundamental question to executives is “Do you want mobile to make you money?”

If the answer is “yes”, then it requires discipline like any other business initiative. The fundamental business goals must be defined. The user experience must be well designed and well tested. The marketing plan must address the right demographics.

If we slap together a clone of the site designed for a PC, which isn’t anything like a phone, we almost guarantee failure. In fact, when Nielsen tested WAP sites in the same study, he found that tasks took users 38% longer in 2009 than in 2000! Phones are faster but perhaps we’re trying to do more and ultimately slowing ourselves down.

Nielsen says, “almost every design decision must be made in the context of the [mobile internet] site being designed, and what works for [one] site may not work for another.” The complexity of phone capabilities, application features, differing contexts, user skill variations and multiplying platforms and technologies often requires professional help in each specialized discipline.

Doing it right means budgeting time and money properly. Cutting corners risks delaying projects even further, damage to your brand, and the expense of convincing customers to give you a second chance when you get your act together.

Look for upcoming announcements for my webcast addressing this and other mobile strategy issues.