Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 3)

Christopher Dean: People are consuming content in smaller amounts. They want action taken when they walk into Macy’s with an app open. A very interesting new development is being able to track a user, see what they’re doing in the app and understanding where they are from a location perspective, then updating a segment of a user, and triggering an action, which is delivering some content, all in real time. That’s one thing that has really evolved and emerged.

The second thing is about not just tracking clicks and time in the app but about conversion events. What every real publisher cares about is their conversion events. What do they ultimately want people to be doing? You have to have a system that tracks all the way through what the conversion event is. Because we sell to a bunch of different verticals, when we walk into a media company, they really want to track whether you watched Jimmy Fallon last night.

Just click-throughs and time spent in app is where the prior generation of analytics and mobile marketing platforms is inadequate today. It certainly is necessary but it’s not sufficient to deliver real insights. Another case study is where we know that if a user is playing in a mobile game and gets stuck in a level, there is a high 90% chance of churning. We can trigger an event. The third time the user gets stuck at level four, we serve an interstitial message into the app and push them through to level five and give them more power so they keep playing. That’s a great way to save the user rather than having the user churn.

You can take that exact same rule set and apply it to shopping cart abandonment. Take Zappos, for example. If I put a pair of shoes in the Zappos shopping cart two times and I haven’t checked out, the third time I do that is when we should trigger a message that says, “Why don’t you take $5 off of that pair of shoes?” That’s the segment of users you want to push through and actually have them complete their transaction. You don’t want to give that $5 off coupon to your entire audience because you’re just going to be cannibalizing your revenue. Being able to target and track users at that level of granularity in real time is a major development with regards to tracking.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds excellent. You did a superb job explaining both the value and evolution. What are the customer categories where you’re seeing this advanced tracking and targeting being adopted the most?

Christopher Dean: The growth of customer satisfaction and making sure that a brand can interact with their consumers or their users in real time as close to the moment that they’ve purchased something or they’ve consumed the service is a broad trend that we see. Yesterday, I was with a very large Asian life insurance provider. They are extremely interested in constantly getting feedback from their customers. They want to hear about it as close to consumption or the use of service.

I’ll give you two examples. One of our customers is the second largest discount airline in the world. They used to ask for customer feedback over email. That email would arrive in your inbox exactly two days after you got off the flight. It wasn’t real time. It wasn’t attached to when you had the experience. They had very bad results overall. They are using Swrve to track the user based on location. They’ve geo-fenced every airport that they fly from and to. They know what flight you’re on. If you fly from London to Dublin, when you turn on your phone in Dublin, they know you’ve arrived. They ask you immediately, in real time, how your flight was. Within the app, they pop up  a conversation, which is one of these very rich in-app messages that we have.

They can send you down three different customer journeys based on your response. If the flight was great, they say, “That’s wonderful.” They allow you to provide some text-based feedback. If it goes all the way to a terrible flight, they literally link you to a phone conversation with a customer support rep at that moment. We see travel and hospitality adopting this because you can intervene on the day of travel and actually truly change the customer’s experience. That’s only possible through a mobile device that understands your location and through a rich app experience with a platform like Swrve underneath that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve
1 2 3 4 5