Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: However, you gave examples of gaming and retail. Are those industries also applying these methodologies and principles aggressively?

Christopher Dean: It’s interesting. One of the powerful reasons that Swrve is so successful is that we started in the mobile gaming space. The mobile game companies and the publishers, which are actually part of larger entertainment companies, were the first businesses in the entire industry to crack the code regarding how you interact with users on mobile and deliver delightful experiences. They were the first to understand managing first-time user experience, delivering delightful game experience so that the user keeps returning again and again and keeps spending money on virtual goods.

Those best practices can be applied to a bunch of these other verticals. Certainly, we do see good adoption in mobile-only and e-commerce, but we do believe that traditional retailers are laggards. I would say media and entertainment industries are early leaders in all of this. We’re beginning to see telecommunications trying to drive good user experience through the apps that they’re bundling on their devices. Technology and social industries in general are also leaders.

A sector that’s being pulled kicking and screaming into it adopting it is consumer banking and consumer financial services. The consumers have fundamentally moved to mobile and want to interact with brands through their mobile devices and that’s even more pronounced than banking. Why they sometimes are hard to sell to and are a little slower from an adoption perspective is that they’ve got pretty significant security requirements if you think about the fact that we’re getting balance updates and transaction updates through our mobile devices.

By the way, we have two good consumer financial services examples that use us. We’ve got a consumer financial services bank. We’ve also got a tax preparation company. You just really have to adhere to regulations and make sure security is very solid.

Sramana Mitra: If you project out based on the evolution that you have tracked so far on where we are going, what would be some key trends that you would highlight?

Christopher Dean: Let’s go back to really what we think is happening right now. Mobile devices are at the centre of our universe right now. All the other traditional digital channels and the emerging digital channels like wearables and cars are revolving around my mobile device, and the experience that I’m having on my mobile device. That’s the first thing that we fundamentally see happening.

The second core nugget we see happening is that we have to deliver orchestrated experiences. Back to the Macys example, if I’m on their website and put a pair of shoes on the their shopping cart, and don’t check out, the next time I open my mobile app, those shoes better be in the shopping cart. We believe that we must orchestrate experiences between all of the traditional digital channels, the new digital channels, the real world channels, and the mobile device. I think that is the future of how one interacts with consumers.

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