You may be a small bootstrapped startup in a garage, building an awesome mobile app sitting in some corner of the world, trying to beat the market leaders, or you could be an Angel or Venture backed “mobile-first” startup with uber-cool office spaces, a popular Product ‘X’ or a Product ‘Y’. But from an end-user perspective, the Customer Experience (CX) that your product offers is what matters most. These days, the bar is set pretty high. It isn’t just about how good your 24 x 7 support team is — I need to feel comfortable using your product. An intuitive product reduces support load and is the key building block to good CX.

I would give zilch about your product if it fails to impress me in this CX test.

1. Are you confusing your users?

Count the number of times you are showing wrong error messages or not showing some critical information because of unplanned UI or a poorly designed on-boarding flow. A new user will not attempt to login if your error messages say “Server Error” or “Unknown Issue” when trying to signup/login for the first time (unless you are a monopoly and they don’t have an alternative!).

There are a lot of people who just want to try a new app whenever it comes to the market. If you confuse your users with wrong error messages or a pretty long on-boarding process (shouldn’t need those 10 swipes. we all skip through them anyway), I am sorry, it won’t be long before the user abandons the app and moves on.

2. Are you annoying your audience?

Do you send push notifications to your users? Do you segment your users to make it relevant? How often do you push them? How do you account for duplicates? Showing too many pop-ups in the app that interrupt the user’s flow? Are you making your user type their e-mail addresses in many places instead of accessing it from their mobile and pre-filling it? Or are you not defaulting to the number keypad when you need them to enter a number?

These are some of the questions you should answer as a Product Owner when you are building the product. The CX here is tightly coupled with the UX. The better the UX, the higher the CX score and happier the customers. If you are going to make your users type a lot or go to multiple screens to access what they want, they will churn. Watch out.

3. Are you on a feature-shipping spree?

Your mobile app could be the dominant interface for the end-user. But are you trying to replicate all the features/options available to the user in web? Are you giving your user a a rich and snappy mobile experience for the most common user flows, or a sluggish and confusing web alternative?

Take the case of a website that lets you pay your bills versus an app that helps you do the same. A website may require you to login every time, whereas in a mobile app, you can persist those sessions easily. Also, consider detecting and automatically approving One Time Passwords (OTP) in your mobile app, vis-à-vis a website, where you will have to manually fill in the OTP. Here both the systems solve the same issue differently.

Now consider an e-commerce site and its app. A website is always better in terms of comparing and choosing what I want to buy, thanks to multiple tabs whereas in a mobile app, that isn’t really possible. But Augmented Reality can trump over multiple tabs because, hey, you get a sense of how the product looks in your environment even before actually adding it to the cart.

IKEA using their app as a VR Catalogue

The CX gain here is that a company should build what is important and what is necessary for mobile. Focus more on the use-cases for mobile app than trying to build whatever you think the user will use. Once you get this out, based on end-users’ feedback, you can iterate further.

4. Do your users need more than one device to sign in / sign up?

One very common mistake I have noticed in many apps is, if both your mobile app and website support sign up and if you have an activation-code verification mechanism, imagine how painful it would be for a mobile user to get only e-mail or a web user to get the activation code only via SMS. Your users need more than one device just to signup. Honestly, I hate clicking on activation emails which open in a mobile browser tab and then ask me to get back to the app to login.

The obvious solution in this case is to send out SMS for mobile and e-mail for web. Activation e-mails with deep links to open the app and complete in-app activation procedure works too.

Slack’s Magic Link is an awesome example of better CX. Credit

5. Are you focusing too much on monetisation?

If you are building mobile apps— one with advertisements and one without, and if both do the same thing, I am sorry I will not use your app at all. But, if you offer me a worthy service and ask me to pay for it, I will definitely buy it if I like your app. The focus should not be on ad placement (just as in websites) but on offering a service worthy enough for the user to pay for it.

A research says most of the mobile advertisement clicks are unintentional. It’s not entirely a great idea if you are going to compromise on UX and CX just for you to make money. Remember, it’s not that people are not willing to pay. They expect meaningful value for the money they spend.

6. How do you engage with your users?

Do you ask your users to send an e-mail to you, by opening their default e-mail client? Do you ask your users to contact them via your website contact page/Twitter/Facebook? Do you show them a web view to load your website FAQ page (www.xyz.com/faqs, which may or may not be mobile optimised)? Do you prefer a form in your app asking users to fill in their query and continue subsequent conversations over e-mail?

Sorry, you fail. YOU FAIL.

The whole point of engaging with your users is to make them connect with you without ever having to leave the app. How do you want to engage with your users in-app? Well, if you’ve asked this question, you’ve asked it right! The important aspect of mobile CX is resolving users’ queries right within your mobile app and not directing them elsewhere.

Let’s take a quick look at what your users will expect:

1. Your users expect lightweight engagement — they want self-help in the form of FAQs within the app and not app updates.

2. “Chat” comes naturally to any mobile user and your users want a seamless chat experience that blends with your mobile app.

3. Users expect faster responses — else be prepared to face their wrath via Facebook and Twitter. (unless you think “any PR is good PR”)

4. Users expect the customer support context to be carried over without them having to provide details over and over again.

Don’t you think it’s high-time you gave importance to Customer Experience (CX) just as you would to User Experience (UX)?

Always remember, CX is the new UX.