Kofax : 5 Facts You Need to Know About Mobile

I thought it would be interesting to take my experience from the past several years of developing mobile applications and apply it to the financial industry. Here are 5 things you should know about mobile:

1. The shift to mobile has already happened.

Just look around. You'll see that millennials aren't the only demographic heavily engaged with their mobile devices; it's nearly everyone. If your customer has a smartphone, and nearly all of them do, rest assured it's their go-to device for information. This is what we call being 'mobile first'.

2. The customer delight bar is high, so you must step up.

Most of the world's most successful businesses (e.g., Amazon, CNN, Facebook, Apple, etc.) are laser-focused on delivering an extraordinary user experience. These companies have set the bar very high, and they keep lifting it higher. Your customers are using at least one, if not all of these apps (what apps?), on either an Android or iPhone, and they expect the experience you deliver via your app to measure up.

Your app is a virtual bank branch, and in all reality it's replacing the brick and mortar bank branch. With the exception of hard currency, your customers expect complete online access to everything the branch has to offer, and more. They want the ability to deposit a check, pay a bill, transfer money, check their balance, and even talk to a teller on their own schedule and in their Banker's hours don't apply in the mobile space; mobile banking is 24/7/365.

To thrive, you must implement every available technology that will improve the user experience: touch ID, voice control, camera, video, notifications, location, near-field communications, and beacons, to name a few. You also need a wearables strategy. If your app doesn't integrate with the Apple Watch, your customer might consider leaving your bank for one that does.

Notifications are an important part of the banking experience, so make sure your customer has a seamless way to enable notifications for common transactions like auto-deposits, auto-payments, when a mobile remote deposit payments has cleared and is available, and when a paper check has been cashed.

3. Your mobile implementation should include a capture solution.

And it needs to be a targeted capture solution that supports banking use cases. Why? Because while people like to take pictures, they aren't always the best photographers. And you have compliance issues, like Check 21, to deal with. People value their time and trust you with their money, so getting a check deposit, bill payment, or ID capture for opening a new account right the first time is important.

With regard to new account opening, it's making a leap from the branch to mobile, skipping desktop entirely. A mobile phone makes capturing documents, like a driver license for prefilling a form, effortless. Plus, unlike a laptop computer, people have their phones at the ready nearly 100% the time.

4. Optimize for a mobile phone, and make sure you have an HTML strategy.

Tablets were still the rage just a year ago, but as phone screen sizes increase, tablets are quickly being relegated to entertainment devices, and some are starting to collect dust. While you can't just ignore tablets, make sure you spend extra time and attention on optimizing your UI for the phone.

We just explained about new account opening via mobile, but didn't go into a lot of detail with regard to implementation. And regarding implementation, there are two main paths a customer will take:

• Downloading your app, and then opening a new account via the app. If a customer is sold on your bank, s/he may start the onboarding process by downloading the app because they are going to use the app anyway. If a new customer can't onboard from the home screen of your app, you've added friction and will likely lose the customer as a result. In the customer's mind, this is an immediate fail, and it will only take them two seconds to delete the app and another 30 seconds to replace it with an app that supports this use case.
• Clicking on a link that opens a mobile browser. A television or radio commercial could pique a customer's interest, and he may open his mobile browser and go to your homepage. He could also click on an advertisement, like the ads embedded in a CNN article, or at the bottom of the Fox News app. While you will have a little less control over the capture experience on an HTML page, partnering with a company that specializes in mobile capture will maximize the capabilities of the mobile browser, which will in turn will optimize the user experience.

5. Ratings, reviews, and social media can rocket you skyward, or drag you down.

This is stating the obvious, but ratings and reviews are front and center on the app store. A user won't think twice about downloading a banking app with a 4 or 5 star rating, they might dig a bit deeper when they see a 3-star average, and anything below 3-stars, is merely swiped to pass on by. So you may ask why I'm stating the obvious. Let me provide a real-life example. My girlfriend is a member of a credit union, and their mobile app is horrible. The interface is messy, plus it doesn't support mobile check deposit. She is fed up, and is shopping for a new bank, one with a great mobile experience, 4-stars minimum. So while it seems like financial institutions should understand the obvious, their mobile apps are still lacking. And you can see this for yourself. Just pick up your mobile phone, you may already be reading this article on it, go to the app store, type in 'bank', and see for yourself. It's surprising how many banks have an average rating of 3-stars or below. They should get it but they don't, and when their customers reach a point where they are fed up it will be effortless for them to switch to a 5-star banking experience.

So now you know a lot more about mobile. Go out there build an amazing app, provide a top-notch capture experience, delight your existing customers, and get ready to onboard all their friends.

If you are attending the BAI retail conference, please be sure to attend Operational Efficiency to Deliver Customer Experience presentation on October 13^th. Brant will be sharing best practices how organizations can improve their customer experience.