Mobile has been on radar screen of companies for a while — with a big part of the focus being on gathering customer feedback.

Until recently, the driving factors have often been company centric:

• cost advantage: lower cost than other platforms
• timing advantage  — 24 access to customers
• unique identification of customer — via mobile number.

But now. in a major market shift,  there is a customer centric pressure — as customers increasingly are treating mobile as their primary platform (even more than online)

The pressure on brands now is that they must be on mobile across their customer interactions, be it
Loyalty programs, Voice of the Customer efforts or Incentive programs.  And across them all a consistent and strong mobile CX needs to be developed.

The pressure arise from the new primary position that the mobile platform occupies for customers. While it may have been unthinkable even 2 years ago, mobile is now a must have — otherwise a company will find itself absent from a platform which customers consider a key way to interact with brands.
In many ways this makes things easier for decision makers, where mobile was one of several competing alternate platforms, it is now THE platform to be implemented — not something open to debate between different decision makers inside executive teams.

The transition is particularly pronounced on a generational basis — with Gen Y and to some extent Gen X being more tied to their mobile phones by a wide margin.

Companies recognize the need to engage with the younger generations — who are their key future markets.  But not all companies are being very successful in that effort.  Much like the tendency to describe Gen X / Y as less loyal than previous generations. companies are reluctant to embrace mobile as the primary platform for accessing their key future customers.  That approach can’t stand much longer, or those who resist the mobile wave will find themselves drowned by it rather than riding it to new growth opportunities.