[Manoj]: Give us a holistic view of the whitepaper.

[Eric Peterson]: Our Mobile Framework white paper provides guidance to marketers and business managers tasked with developing, deploying, and evaluating customer-facing efforts in emerging channels. The goal of the paper was to provide a reasonably deployed set of metrics that can be used to tie fixed Internet, mobile Internet, mobile applications, and other emerging channels together.

A nice aside is that this framework and our use of Interaction, Engagement, and Positive Feedback can be applied not only to channels but also to individual technology efforts within the business. For example, one Web Analytics Demystified client is exploring how this framework can be applied to their investment into video. Another is deploying these metrics into their Social Media efforts.

[Manoj]: How is capturing voice of customer different in mobile vs. the traditional web?

[Eric Peterson]: The challenge is that “capturing voice of customer” is pretty diverse on the traditional web, which speaks to our observation that Voice of Customer is really many different efforts (satisfaction scoring, feedback gathering, polls, etc.) Some of these strategies require asking lots of questions which works great on big screens but not so great on smaller screens. On small screens, and especially in mobile applications, the “ease-of-collection” bar is higher and so the response user experience is even more important.

This is one of the reasons we were excited to work with OpinionLab on the paper — we think their approach is very sound and provides the easiest gateway to quantified and actionable information. Have a look at how Expedia.com has implemented their technology by way of example; you click “Feedback”, provide a numerical assessment, provide direct feedback, and you’re done.

[Manoj]: Do you think user experience is even more important in mobile?

[Eric Peterson]: I’m not sure I think it is “more important” in mobile. I think user experience is important ** everywhere ** and the challenge in mobile is that most companies are still working out what “good user experience” actually looks like. This is, of course, aggravated by the diversity of screens, applications, and platforms we reference in the paper — “good experience” on iOS will differ from Android, Blackberry, Windows, etc. and so our point of view is that reasonable, directly comparable metrics that tie fixed web, mobile, and other emerging channel efforts together is very important.

[Manoj]: What are some of the most useful KPIs in mobile? (with the understanding it’s contextually specific to the type of business)

[Eric Peterson]: Interaction, Engagement Rate, Percent Positive Feedback, and cost-related measures of each. Basically the bulk of the white paper describes our recommended key performance indicators for use in and across mobile and emerging technology efforts.

Wonderfully these are ** not ** contextually specific to business, mostly because it is incredibly difficult to create metrics that are business relevant that span these channels. For example, your web site likely exists to sell products, but your mobile site may or may not actually have a transactional component, your mobile app likely ** does not ** support transactions directly, and your SMS efforts almost certainly do not. In this case does it make sense to track “conversion rate” or “revenue per visit?”

Probably not.

Our point of view is that mobile and emerging channel efforts are going to happen and will hopefully be analyzed deeply based on the specific goal for each channel and technology type. The KPIs we describe in the OpinionLab paper power a higher-level view to let Executives compare the costs and relative response to each of these types of investments. With this data management can evaluate whether the level of investment in each channel is producing appropriate results (or if more investment or some other change action is required.)

[Manoj]: Will mobile users leave enough qualitative feedback on mobile in order for organizations to make educated business decisions?

[Eric Peterson]: Definitely. Have you had a look at Apple’s App Store recently? People seem to take great delight in providing this type of qualitative feedback — not always pretty, but often very useful. Even better, according to OpinionLab customers their mobile users are dramatically more likely to provide feedback, even if the absolute numbers aren’t as large today.

Additionally, we specifically focus on “Percent Positive Feedback” as our recommended KPI because it is volume independent. Even at small numbers, if you get ten pieces of feedback, two of which score negative, two that score neutral, and six that score positive you’re doing a pretty good job. Especially when you track these numbers over time and use a directly comparable system across and between channels you start to develop a pretty good sense of where you are delighting your users (and where you need to work.)