People love their phones, and they use them for everything. Consumers are shopping on mobile, checking the weather, video chatting, using their phones as a GPS—pretty much nothing is off-limits for a smartphone user these days. And mobile live chat for support is not an exception.
But just because smartphone users can do an astronomical amount of stuff on their phone doesn’t mean that companies are optimizing their offerings for mobile. In fact, many companies have been pretty lazy about taking a holistic view of consumer behavior on mobile to upgrade their mobile offerings. It’s time for this to stop.
Smartphones are popular because they are growing better and better each year. Now it’s possible to do pretty much any basic desktop function on a phone, and they are faster with better cameras and more memory than ever before. Where other devices have stagnated on big innovation—like desktop computers—phones have continued to change.
Despite this, companies are still failing to upgrade their live chat for support for mobile users in a satisfactory way. They make their mobile support offerings available but not practical, which is why many customers hate live chat for support. There are a few apps with great functionality, especially in the e-commerce space. Retail apps like Tradesy are a perfect example; they cater to e-commerce users and function as a whole mobile-friendly ecosystem without a user even having to touch the website.
But not every company has taken such a shine to new consumer uses for mobile phones. Companies frequently miss opportunities to offer their mobile users better function and better live chat for support experience—whether that’s a web store or a photo editing service. The companies that do well on mobile are often mobile-first or mobile-only companies. Other companies are struggling to optimize.
Optimizing for mobile means more than just site layout
When many companies today think about mobile optimization, the first thing that pops onto their radar is having a mobile-friendly version of their website.
This thinking is years behind the times.
Mobile optimization is more than making your site work on a mobile phone. It’s about adopting your total consumer experience to work for those reaching you through a mobile device. Yes, you have to have a site that is optimized for mobile, but you also need to understand that the way people interact with content on their phone is fundamentally different than the way people behave on their desktops.
Cover illustration by Karthikeyan Ganesh
