This is 2012.
This is Canada.
This is the age of mobile.
Yet marketing teams continue to waste time, money and effort on deploying useless mobile engagement. The result of poor execution for the company; time, cost and failure to collect valuable user information. The result for the user; frustration.
What is most astounding to me is that during the entire process of building the strategy, mapping out the campaign and the associated collateral that somebody did not test this execution and say, “Wait a minute, this is not functional. We need a different execution”.
So, what has me going. Here is the scenario.
Early this week I met a long-time friend of mine for lunch at Original Joe’s in Kensington. I had the Fish and Chips and my friend had the Cob Salad. All in all the meal was good and the conversation even better. When we received the bill they included the following;
I was impressed that they included a QR Code on the survey. To me this makes a lot of sense to capture feedback at the time of checkout. What also is smart is that by including a QR Code, it gives a person immediate access to the survey on their smartphone. This is definitely going to generate a higher volume of responses than waiting for a person to get to their home/office to complete the survey at OriginalJoesSurvey.com.
As I pulled out my iPhone, ready to provide some good feedback, here is what I encountered.
FAIL!!
Looks like they decided to simply forward me to the non-mobile website. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I decided to Click Here to get started hoping that perhaps the landing page is not mobile optimized but the survey itself it.
Then I encountered the following:
BIG FAIL!!!!
How the hell is this functional?
What started off as a pretty good execution quickly turned into a waste for both Original Joe’s and myself. How many people on their smartphone are going through the same process and what is the opportunity lost to Original Joe’s by not providing a true mobile experience for their survey. I can’t help think to myself that either the marketing team at Original Joe’s are not digitally savvy or they just completely failed user experience testing.
Why this matters and why local businesses should start taking mobile seriously.
Earlier this month IAB Canada released the following document, Mobile in Canada: A Summary of Current Facts & Trends. As it relates to this article here are some interesting data points worth taking note of.
There are 25.9M mobile phones in Canada with 45% of them SmartPhones. That is over 11.6M Smart phones in market.
In a given month, 1/6th or 16% of users are scanning in a QR Code. That means over 1.8M smart phones are used to scan in a QR Code. That is a pretty large number.
According to ComScore Mobile Lens, 18.7% of smart phones are located in the prairie region, which includes Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This means of the potential base 1.8M smart phones that are used to scan a QR code, one could calculate that 337K of those are located in the prairies.
Now if I do some quick math. Alberta represents 62% of this region (source:wikipedia). This means 209K QR Scans / month in the Alberta region. Now, Calgary represents 32% of Alberta’s population. That represents around 67K QR Scans / month just in Calgary alone. Over the course of a year this a potential base of 802K QR Scans. At 1/10th of 1% this would be this would represent 802 opportunities to get feedback / year. This is probably still higher, so even if we take 10% of this base that is 80 opportunities per year to get feedback.
Now in the case of Original Joe’s, they have locations across all of Western Canada, including BC, so the opportunity they are losing by not providing a true mobile experience to solicit feedback is significant.
I shake my head on how such a blatant oversight in user experience makes it to this stage of execution.
What a waste.