The majority of mobile searches occur in the afternoon and evening with a staggering 22% occurring after 8pm. Whilst it’s easy enough to shift your advertising to focus on that critical slot it’s not so easy to extend your near-line activities until midnight. This presents challenges for businesses that rely on sales infrastructure built around contact centres answering phones and online-chat operators dealing with queries. This is even more important as mobile actions need to be dealt with quicker and are also more likely to generate inbound calls to businesses as folks want quick answers.
So, despite having a PC to hand, folks are now using mobile as a more convenient way to search, even in the home. Mobile has largely doubled over the last year and is set to continue to grow so what do organisation need to do to deal with this explosion.
- Ensure they have a mobile-optimised site
- Make the mobile experience rich for mobile
- Provide off-ramp sales functions till much later in the day, 10pm would be a good start
Some elements are easier than other. For example, going mobile is pretty easy these days but it’s a bit trickier to extend the working day to 10pm or even midnight. More shifts for staff, home-working and on-demand service are all ways to address the opportunity and, usefully, first-mover advantage in the space is pretty obvious. The logistics are not so easy, the additional cost of running longer hours might be prohibitive as might be the change cost in terms of HR and working practices.
It strikes me this is a good opportunity to create a virtual team, probably working location-independent to deal with this change. A small team, almost on-call could deal with the extended hours.
