Set Your Goals
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how to set meaningful and specific goals.
- Define the objectives for your mobile strategy.
- Develop success metrics for your objectives.
Set Your Destination
Here’s the thing about a journey: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll have a heck of a time trying to get there. So now is the time to choose a destination!
When crafting a mobile strategy, it’s critical to set goals and objectives so that your mobile initiatives provide value to your organization. In this unit, we dive into the first component of mobile strategy: business value.
Choose the Right Goals
Many mobile projects fail because organizations don’t take the time to align their mobile strategy with actual business objectives.
Too often companies have vague goals for their mobile initiatives, like “improve the customer experience.” But what does that actually mean? Another common mistake is relying solely on engagement metrics—like user logins or app downloads—to measure mobile success. When it comes to actual business impact, engagement metrics are relatively meaningless. Think about it: Your app has 20,000 users. OK...so what? How do you translate that number into overall value and ROI?
Be Specific
Every organization has business goals. Maybe your company wants to reduce costs or improve employee productivity or increase revenue. Those are admirable goals, but they’re pretty broad. For example, there are lots of ways to increase revenue. More meaningful mobile goals can include things like acquiring new customers or retaining existing customers.
But you can be even more specific than that, can’t you? From a general value statement like “increase revenue,” you can drill down to objectives such as “increase new leads from existing customers” or “increase customer satisfaction.”
Define Your Objectives
It probably goes without saying that you need access to your company’s overall business strategy in order to define objectives. That’s why your mobile vision is typically formulated by a mobile steering group: a small team of key stakeholders who are responsible for business outcomes and understand the holistic customer and employee experience.
Every organization is different, so we can’t tell you what your goals should be. But here are a few sample objectives just to give you an idea:
| Business Value | Business Objective |
|---|---|
| Revenue gain | Increase the customer retention rate |
| Cost reduction | Improve service response times |
| Productivity gain | Reduce onboarding time for sales reps |
| Productivity gain | Improve cross-functional collaboration |
Keep Mobility in Mind
Whether your goals are related to revenue gains or process improvements, ask yourself this question: Where can mobility have the greatest impact?
Let’s say you want to focus on employee productivity. Which employees can benefit most from a mobile solution? Probably users who are typically away from their desks, like field sales and service personnel. You can start there, and then gradually develop mobile solutions and ideas for other types of employees.
Tip
Some organizations find it beneficial to focus initially on goals related to operations and productivity. Why? If your company is new to mobility, you’re probably going to make mistakes along the way. And that’s natural—with mobile maturity comes growing pains.
So plan for early bumps in the road; learn your mobile lessons on a small scale by building internal apps for employees. Gain valuable experience and demonstrate the value of mobile. Then you can develop customer apps with confidence.
Visualize Success
After defining objectives and goals, start thinking about how to measure the results of your mobile initiatives. What does success look like? What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) will you use?
Let’s say your objective is to increase customer retention rates. You can track:
- Percent increase in revenue retention
- Percent increase in the number of retained customers
- Percent decrease in the number of callbacks
Also evaluate how your mobile initiatives influence other channels and touchpoints. For example, if your goal is to reduce support costs by deflecting customers to a self-service mobile app, you can track the number of cases closed through the mobile app versus the call center.
Don’t skip this step. Without the proper metrics and KPIs, you can’t gauge the effectiveness of your mobile strategy. And if you can’t prove mobile ROI, you’ll have trouble gaining support for future mobile projects.
With your goals and metrics established, you’re ready to tackle the next component of mobile strategy: user value. In the next unit, you learn how to research your users’ needs and incorporate their goals into your mobile vision.