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3 Reasons why mobile-first has to be your KPI strategy

In some of my last blog posts, I already shared thoughts about the importance of airline KPIs. Especially the real-time relevance of KPIs. However, so far, I left out the topic about how to provide KPIs to your audience.

How’s the status quo at many airlines?

When discussing this aspect with colleagues from airlines, I’m sometimes surprised. Mobile solutions to present KPIs on the recipient’s mobile phone are still very uncommon. Quite the contrary, many airlines still rely on one of the following two things:

  • PDF Reports: Created regularly (monthly, weekly, daily) and send out via mail to all recipients.
  • Desktop solutions: Specific tools that allows users to access KPIs with their laptop or office PC. Sometimes these desktop solutions allow mobile access — however, most often, this is very suboptimal.

I think that this situation does no longer meet the requirements of employees. Even more critical, it massively limits the potential of KPI monitoring and the related impact.

mobile kpi airline
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Mobile-friendly, mobile-first, mobile-only

When talking about the ability to present content or use solutions on mobiles, we can differentiate between four stages:

  • Not mobile: Solutions or content was developed for desktop devices. Usage on mobile is either not possible or very uncomfortable.
  • Mobile-friendly: The solution or the content was developed for desktop clients and afterward tried to be optimized for the usage on mobile devices.
  • Mobile-first: The solution or the content was developed for mobile users first. Afterward, it gets optimized for desktop usage — but not necessarily.
  • Mobile-only: The solution or content can only be used on mobile devices.

Already six years ago, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, announced Google’s mobile-only strategy. You don’t have to be very far-sighted to know that he was pointing in the right direction.

However, enterprises and enterprise solutions are slightly different. Especially when considering the status-quo of many airlines in terms of KPIs and IT solutions. Therefore, it is my firm conviction that mobile-only would be slightly over the top — and mobile-first should be the envisioned state.

But why do I think that mobile-first is the right approach to provide KPIs to your internal stakeholders? There are three main reasons why you should go for a mobile-first strategy. Unsurprisingly, most of them also account for a mobile-only approach.

Meet your audience where they are

Gone are the days when employees were sitting in front of the desktop PCs from 9-5. Today’s business world is different. We spend a lot of time in meetings, work from different places, work from home, and — especially in the aviation industry — travel a lot.

For many employees, it is difficult to access the required information. They don’t have their laptop at hand, VPN connection problems, no WiFi available….this list is endless.

To meet your audience, you have to provide information on a device that is always at hand — their mobile.

Your audience is getting more demanding

People are more and more used to accessing everything via apps on their mobile. News apps, banking apps, taxi apps, you name it — everything on mobiles. And that’s precisely why employees no longer understand why this shouldn’t be possible with enterprise solutions.

If you don’t meet that demand, very quickly, your IT will have the label of a department providing outdated solutions, which are hard to use.

Driving a KPI culture

If you want to drive a KPI culture. If you want your employees to make decisions based on KPIs — based on facts — you have to make it as easy as possible for them to access this information. Again, mobile solutions are the approach to achieving this goal.

If employees can’t access this information or if they consider the way of accessing the information as too complicated, they will rapidly stop consuming the information. Accordingly, this would have a substantial negative impact on business decisions and a — from my point of view — rich KPI culture, which is inevitable.

What do you think? How does your mobile KPI strategy look? Are you already focusing on mobile-first?

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Benjamin Walther

CEO, Frankfurt

Benjamin is Information Design's CEO and a proven content-maniac. Besides running a successful business and developing pioneering ideas, he's dedicated to writing blog posts and creating content.

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