Might as well face it, you’re addicted to your device

“You’d like to think that you’re immune to the stuff. It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough.” Robert Palmer

Those who were around in the 1980s will recognise this quote from rock music’s classic anthem about love addiction, Addicted to Love.

Many weren’t around then, but they’ll have no trouble recognising the call of dependency in its many latter-day forms – coffee, the Internet, junk food, social media – and of course digital devices. They’re everywhere.

There are more SIM cards on the planet than humans and more mobile devices than tooth brushes. Analysts say the global scale of mobile device adoption is on an upward j-curve so steep it looks almost vertical.

As a probable addict, your behaviour becomes somewhat predictable. You’re on LinkedIn right now, which means there’s almost a 50% chance you’re on a mobile device. Chances are you reach for your phone around 7:30 every a.m., checking your emails and Facebook before getting out of bed. You glance at your smartphone around 1 500 times a week (221 times a day, or once every 4.3 minutes).

This one deserves a paragraph all its own: The average UK smartphone user looks at their phone for 3 hours per day - that’s 18.8% of total waking hours we now have our eyes on the small screen!

So how do companies make the most of this device mania for their business?

There’s mobile commerce, of course, and it’s bigger and more real than many expected. Handhelds were used for 57.1% of all online shopping in the US on Christmas day in 2014. Yes, 2015 is going to be the year for businesses to capitalise on mobile commerce.

Then there’s mobility in the office. Companies need to use the obsession with devices to their advantage with a BYOD management initiative. This is already well under way, with many organisations looking to make it mandatory.

Business processes within the organisation are also riding the wave of mobile-powered transformation, with applications in choreographing warehouse flows, fleet management and marketing.

It won’t be that easy to fully leverage devices within and outside the organisation, unfortunately. It encompasses a vast, distributed and heterogeneous ecosystem of touch points, and the business end of it is outside your control.

This mobile revolution is almost entirely about the consumer, who after all holds the power in their hands. More specifically, it is about the experience the customer wants to have, not the experience you’d like them to choose.

Put in a way that businesses can appreciate and respect – no organisation can afford to prescribe to a customer how and what to buy. Customers today have a lot of choice. They live in an omni-channel world, and they do things the way they want to. They dictate the customer experience (CX).

It’s not about creating an app. There are a billion apps out there. The trick to creating a human experience that delights on any device of the user’s choice is to find the right partner that understands this challenge, and how to help you design user experiences (UX) that can deliver the desired CX.

Large organisations will need help figuring out how to get cogent views of the preferred CX from their customers, how to evolve what they currently offer, how to deal with feedback (customers are not likely to buy from a brand again when they’ve had a poor experience with it), and how to adapt operationally to accommodate all that.

A crucial consideration is the extent to which organisations live and breathe the experience they want to deliver inside the organisation. Do our employees enjoy an immersive, engaged working experience, or are they disconnected (literally) in their work processes and interaction with the brand and customers?

Lastly, remember that you can never really complete this journey, or it wouldn’t be a journey. New devices, channels and functionalities emerge all the time, and they need to be harnessed, or you’ll risk becoming stale.

I discussed some of these ideas briefly in the recent ITWeb Digital Economy Summit – watch the video here.

Follow me on twitter on @naikl