Cape Town - As cellphone penetration rockets in South Africa, companies have been slow to realise that they are obliged to optimise their communications for a mobile generation, says an industry insider.
"Many companies recognise that mobile solutions are crucial and adopt a mentality of 'mobile first' design strategies. However, they do not recognise that every action customers take will not happen the same across every channel," said Reynhardt Uys, associate consultant of Customer Experience and User Experience at BSG.
While many feature phones are still in circulation, research shows that the devices are on the way out in Sub-Saharan Africa as people migrate toward smartphones.
A survey from the International Data Corporation revealed that 2014 saw a record 83% growth in smartphones in the Middle East and Africa.
A major reason for that regional growth in smartphones has been the price.
User experience
Phones priced between $100 and $200 saw a significant surge in price from 25% to 33% in market share.
Companies need to realise that in designing a user experience, they need to take into account multiple devices and interactions, said Uys.
"Designing a mobile experience still needs to be based on understanding that channel's role in the ecosystem of user interactions with an organisation, and user research needs to drive the channel strategy."
Apps are driving smartphone user engagement. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
For example, a bank might retain its USSD system of transacting for customers with feature phones, while at the same time developing a mobile application for smartphone users.
As people increasingly use multiple devices to connect with and transact on the internet, South African companies need to design applications that work equally well on all platforms.
"With the growing consumerisation of IT, UX [user experience] is becoming a competitive differentiator. Companies will succeed or fail in the future, based on their ability to deliver IT services or functionality designed with the customer experience in mind," Uys said.
Fin24 sister publication News24 has consistently updated its mobile application with features that both personalise and localise content that people want to consume.
Financial reward
The BBC news app, for example, also offers consumers way to order content topics according to user preference, as well as automatically caching content for when a mobile connection is not available.
Uys said that companies that focused on user experience were seeing stronger financial growth.
"We're already seeing massive differences in terms of financial performance between companies that take UX seriously and those that don't, purely because customers will always choose good experiences over bad."
BSG is a business technology strategy company that focuses on changing the way firms interact with consumers.
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