After completing in-depth interviews with about 50 creative and digital directors, brand managers, and mobile development executives during a study I did for Info-Tech Research Group, two qualities emerged as important correlates of a branded app’s marketing effectiveness:

• Usefulness, the quality of an app that enables users to complete a practical task in a way that is significantly easier than their conventional approach to task completion. For example, a store locator feature is useful because with a single touch you can find the nearest store of interest, while on the Web you’d need to type in your location or skim over a list of store locations.
• Socialness, the quality of an app that enables users to interact with others in a way that is emotionally rewarding or useful; for example, sharing family photos or asking for help from a peer group.

Of course other qualities such as entertainment value and usability are also important, but this post focuses on usefulness and socialness as they apply to the branded mobile apps developed by pharmaceutical companies for the baby care and baby development market, a global market worth over $44B US annually [1].

In a study that measured physiological changes during the use of branded mobile apps [2], Dr. Potter concluded that a useful app "increases the general interest in the product category that you're trying to sell, and the app also improves the attitude that you have toward the sponsoring brand ... and the purchase intention that you have towards the product". With some carefully controlled research suggesting that useful apps increase marketing effectiveness, it’s safe to conclude that baby care apps will be more effective if they are more useful.

It doesn’t take much persuasion to convince a brand manager that social access is important. The hype level on the subject is close to deafening. But while a Facebook or Twitter share button provide a superficial social component, deep socialness require that social features are directly integrated into an app’s functionality. For example, if an app allows you to post data it has collected and a related question to an interactive Web forum or Facebook wall, it will facilitate meaningful conversations and raise an app’s social value. If the conversation takes place within the app, it will also drive app adoption because the users have to download the app to participate in the discussion.

This year’s Advertising Week in New York was full of presentations on mobile and social marketing. I attended one of these by Laura Simpson, Global Director of McCann Truth Central in which she shared some fascinating research results from their online quantitative study of 6,800 moms in developed and developing countries [3]. The research suggest moms leverage their social network to solve the practical "mom" problems they face daily and paints a picture of the "mom economy" as an ecosystem in which switched-on moms exchange information and support and are socially rewarded for sharing.

In her day-to-day activities, each mom accumulates a wide range of information, from food for their family, cleaning methods, party entertainment, child education and care, as well as shopping and accounting. The job, in other words, is a serious multi-tasking challenge. Not everyone can be good at everything, so most moms specialize in a few areas. Figure 1 below shows the percentage of moms surveyed that regarded themselves as an expert in a particular area.

Fig 1. Moms see themselves as experts in some but not all required areas.

Moms bridge the expertise gap by getting together with other moms for advice, ideas, favors, and empathy. This creates a culture of community and sharing. Moms love to share: 88% of respondents said they want to share any interesting piece of information they come across and 37% said they would like to share it with as many people as possible.

How are moms communicating to their community and conducting their tasks? Technology is increasingly being used as the medium for communication and data gathering: 84% of moms said that technology simplifies their life. In fact, so strong is their attachment to technology that 49% of married mothers preferred to save their communication tool, whether mobile phone or computer, over their engagement ring!

Given that socialness will enhance the marketing effectiveness of any app, and the mom economy makes socialness even more important, designing deep socialness into an app should be a design priority.

Apps that focus on baby care and baby development are rapidly becoming a popular category in mobile app stores. They are usually designed to address one or several daily baby concerns. Let’s look at the usefulness of the feature set and socialness of the design of five popular branded baby apps.

This iPhone and iTouch app was built by the makers of Similac baby formula. It primarily focuses on tracking baby feeding, sleeping, diaper changes, and growth. Tips and advice are thrown in as well.

[soliloquy id="946"]

Fig 2. Similac Baby Journal: Tracking, displaying, and sharing baby care data.

The app helps moms track their baby’s sleep patterns, breast feeding, bottle feeding, and diaper changes and displays the data graphically, which allows moms to improve their baby care routines. Moms can also email the information to their pediatricians, family, or friends.

• Usefulness: Moms inclined to track baby care data will find the app useful for data capture and data review.
• Socialness: The email sharing function facilitates social sharing. Socialness could be improved by allowing data to be shared app to app. For example, a Web or tablet-based app for pediatricians could receive data from the Baby Journal app, and further manipulate and display it in ways that would stimulate doctor-mom dialogue.

Similac Baby Journal on Apple’s App Store

[pharma-ad]

AmazingBaby is an iOS and Android app built by pediatric nutrition product maker Enfamil. The app focuses on child development and provides ways to monitor and structure play time and bath time. The app tracks motor, cognitive, communication, and social milestones.

[soliloquy id="951"]

Fig 3. AmazingBaby Enfamil: Activity monitoring, capturing, and sharing child development app.

The app features are organized by "moment," defined as play time, fresh air, bath time, and quiet time. In all, 17 pre-programmed activities are designed to be fun and beneficial for a baby’s development. There are descriptions for each activity and the skills associated. You can snap pictures as you play and share them with friends and family over email and Facebook. There is also a "memories" timeline, organized by date, where you can see all activities played, milestones reached, and moments that could be interesting to re-visit when enough time passes.

• Usefulness: Moms inclined to track baby development data will find the app useful for data capture and review. Moms looking for new ideas of how they can interact with their baby to simulate development may also find the pre-programmed activities of value.
• Socialness: The social aspect of this app focuses on communications to family and friends over email and Facebook, mostly focused on photo sharing. The app adds some socialness value because these photos can be tied to a specific aspect of the baby’s development or developmental milestone, rather than generic photo sharing.

AmazingBaby on Apple’s App Store | AmazingBaby on Google Play

Built by Pfizer, I-Nanny is an iPhone app designed to provide expert baby care advice. The app covers warm care (growth tips and tracking), baby care information, and expert Q & A. Figure 4 below shows some screens for the Chinese market.

[soliloquy id="956"]

Fig 4. Illuma I-Nanny: Chinese informational and advice app.

Illuma I-Nanny is primarily a reference app even if it provides some baby care tools. One very useful feature built into this app is that it provides opportunities for moms to interact directly with qualified medical and child care experts, but this is mostly a one-to-one communication. Moms can ask a doctor advice on different health issues relating to their baby.

• Usefulness: Having reference material close at hand is useful, but only marginally better than a reference book or computer. The build in advisory function is useful but presumably expensive to deliver.
• Socialness: The user-to-expert communication is a type of social interaction, but this app's socialness could be enhanced if it also provided tools to access mom’s peer group.

Illuma I-Nanny on Apple’s App Store

SMA Baby Know How is an English-language iPhone app built by Pfizer that focuses on baby care. It has features that center on practical advice, as well as pregnancy and baby care tracking tools. For pregnant women the app provides tools to countdown due dates, week by week guide to your baby’s development, a kick counter to monitor baby movement, and a timer to record length and intervals of contractions.

[soliloquy id="969"]

Fig 5. SMA Baby Know How: Baby care and video sharing app.

For newly delivered mothers the app provides a baby age counter, week-by-week guide to baby growth and development, a daily feeds and needs tool (including breast or bottle feeds, nappy changes and sleep), and a Baby First milestone tool, that track moments like first smiles, first steps, and sleep. The app also features practical advice and videos.

Sharing again is limited to emails to mom’s friends and family, but this is a good way to make a baby’s development more social.

• Usefulness: The app is packed with features, many of which moms will likely find useful.
• Socialness: The email sharing function facilitates social interaction. Socialness could be improved by allowing data to be shared app to app.

SMA Baby Know How on Apple’s App Store

Bedtime Baby Sleep is an iPhone app built by Johnson & Johnson as a tool to help the 25-30% of babies that have trouble sleeping. I’m sure their sleep deprived parents are also grateful. There is a personal touch from the start, requiring parents to register online and create an account and baby profile. The app integrates the company’s three-step nighttime routine that helps babies fall asleep easier and sleep through the night better.

[soliloquy id="961"]

Fig 6. Johnsons Bedtime: Sleep logging, habit, forum, and lullaby functions.

The app provides parents access to the advice of sleep analysts, including Dr. Jodi Mindell, who are ready to provide expert advice on sleep-related questions. Johnson & Johnson claims to have a clinically proven method for babies to fall asleep easily and sleep through the night. App features include a sleep log, a three-step nighttime routine with instructive videos, and step-by-step advice, access to sleep analysts, lullabies and ambient sounds to help soothe babies to sleep. The app links to a forum for moms.

• Usefulness: The app has a well-integrated set of features with a core focus on sleep, which moms will likely find useful.
• Socialness: Social aspects of this app are more diverse than the others surveyed here. In addition to one-to-one contact with a specialist, it has an integrated forum, which leverages peer-to-peer communication.

Johnson's Bedtime Baby Sleep on Apple’s App Store

Baby care and development apps are a great branding opportunity for pharmaceutical companies and other brands interested in accessing the mom economy. They can enhance a brand’s relationship with mom, the primary decision maker, gatekeeper, and brand ambassador to the market. Most of the apps outlined above accomplish this with high usefulness. They are packed with what are likely useful features.

Unfortunately, most of the apps I looked at only scratch the socialness surface with basic features like email and Facebook sharing. Their marketing effectiveness could be greatly enhanced if app features facilitated sharing of rich information and easy dialogue in the robust mom economy, whether over the Web, Facebook, and Twitter, or within an app itself. Sharing over existing social networks like Facebook leverages their existing user base and infrastructure. In-app sharing drives app downloads and keeps customers fully focused on the brand message within the app. Given the importance of the sharing to the mom economy, this kind of deep socialness can make the difference between a somewhat effective branded app and a highly effective branded app.

1. Baby Care Products Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth and Forecast 2007 – 2017, Transparency Market Research, April 2012
2. The Effectiveness of Branded Mobile Phone Apps, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Steven Bellman and Robert F. Potter et al, November 2011
3. The Truth About Moms, McCann’s Thought Leadership Unit, July 2012

During a field study that included a major financial institution’s contact center, a senior manager grabbed my attention with this nugget: “every second is a full-time employee in our world” [1].

He went on to describe how, if the average-call time increased by 20 seconds per call, his center must hire 20 new agents at a loaded cost of almost $1 million every year. His math was based on a contact center with about 240 agents who handle the average call in less than two minutes. Your math might be different, but the principle is the same: faster is cheaper.

Faster may be cheaper but it’s not always better. Rushed calls can result in poor customer satisfaction, lowered first-call resolution, missed cross-sell opportunities, increased agent stress, and higher agent turnover. The well-known challenge of contact center management is the challenge of managing these often-competing priorities.

Faced with demands from head office to support a much more complex product offering while maintaining current call-handle times, the senior manager quoted above turned to the same process that Apple uses to develop its products, including the phenomenally successful iPod. The process is called usability engineering and is intended to enhance product usability, defined in ISO 9241 as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.” Usability engineering (also known as user-experience engineering [2] or user-centered design) is a best practice among the world’s leading high-tech companies including IBM, Motorola, Google, Amazon, and, yes, Apple.

Apple’s usability engineering process led to innovative features like the iPod’s signature Click Wheel and more recently its touch interface. Perhaps more importantly, the process helped Apple’s engineers get the details right, leading to a product that “just works.” If the iPod was as difficult to use as a typical VCR, Apple’s share price might still be around $8—where it was before the iPod’s introduction—instead of today’s $180.

How can a process used to design consumer technology be applied to a contact center? In other words, what does the iPod have in common with a contact center? The short answer is they both have a user interface with which users control their technology. In the contact center, the main user is the agent, and the main user interface is the agent-facing software. This could include the database front-end used to retrieve and enter customer data, the knowledgebase that contains product and policy information, and any other software the agents use to do their jobs. Unfortunately, agent-facing software is often as difficult to use as a poorly designed VCR.

For example, agents struggle with entering and retrieving data from several different applications or having to drill deep into an application to get what they need. An agent interviewed during a field study of agent-facing software put it this way:

Why do we have to go to all these places? Log here, look for here, oh I didn’t find it here, so I have to go to there. Why can’t they integrate everything in one place?

This is the problem that the unified agent desktop software attempts to solve. A unified desktop software can improve the usability of agent-facing software, but to maximize agent productivity gains, components of the desktop must be designed to integrate with the agent’s workflow.

Other productivity drains include poor text labels and obscure abbreviations. One agent complained:

It’s very, very convoluted. We’re basically looking for data in fields with names that are totally unrelated to what you’re actually looking for… It’s just not intuitive at all. Not intuitive. And the abbreviations don’t make sense at all.

These are only a few of the problems that impede agent productivity. Other issues are subtle and agents may not report them. For example, often user-interface text is presented in all uppercase. Unfortunately, uppercase text has been shown to take 13% longer to decode than mixed-case text. This will have an impact on agent productivity although agents are unlikely to notice it.

Improving the usability of agent-facing software has a direct and inverse relationship with call-handle time: the more usable the software the shorter the average call-handle time. But usable software provides other benefits: it reduces agent stress and agent training costs by simplifying the agent’s workflow, supports cross-selling efforts by putting sales information at the agent’s fingertips, and improves customer satisfaction by helping agents serve clients faster and better. Imagine what would happen if your agent-facing software “just worked” as easily and elegantly as an iPod? Even if you couldn’t make it that user friendly, making it more agent friendly is worth the effort. How can the usability engineering process make this happen?

Usability engineering is not about technology. You can apply it to any type of agent-facing software on any platform that can be custom configured. Usability engineering is about observing and listening to contact center agents and incorporating what is learned into the design of their user interface. It is highly iterative: data is collected, designs prototyped, prototypes tested, all in several cycles until a productive design is delivered.

Usability is engineered in five iterative phases:

1. Business objectives for the engineering effort are defined, for example, to reduce average call-handle time by 20% or to increase cross-sell rates by 10%.
2. User research is completed by watching agents work and noticing pain points and time wasters. Agents are also interviewed to more fully understand the thought processes and motivations that lead agents to interact with the software in a particular way.
3. User requirements are defined by identifying areas where business objectives and user research overlap. For example, if a business objective was to increase cross-sell rates and user research showed that agents took an average of ten seconds to find the appropriate pricing information, a user requirement would be to reduce average find time to not more than three seconds.
4. User interface design is completed by developing a series of increasingly detailed models or prototypes, iteratively evaluating and redesigning each type before moving to the next. These would begin with the information architecture in the form of a diagram showing how menus or data are to be structured, then progress to a sketch of the screen design, and end with an electronic prototype of the software. This iterative design process contains development costs because a mockup is much less expensive to redesign than a finished suite of agent-facing software.
5. Usability evaluations are implemented by testing models and prototypes with agents as they perform simulated tasks. These tests generate new design ideas and determine when user requirements have been met.

By following a usability engineering process, the financial institution described above dramatically improved the usability of their agent-facing software. In the words of one agent: “Everything is user friendly. After a couple of months you’re a pro.”

Because of this enhanced usability, the contact center was able to maintain its call-handle times despite a significant increase in the complexity of the product it supported. Had the agent facing software remained the same, call-handle times would have likely gone through the roof.

Of course, usability will not solve all your contact center problems. However, in most cases it will improve performance. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. And in a world where faster is cheaper, every second counts.

1. How may I help you? An ethnographic view of contact center HCI, Howard Kiewe, International Journal of Usability Studies, February 2008
2. User Experience Engineering Essentials: Series Introduction, Howard Kiewe.com, August 2007