The Mobile Playbook: Guest post from 1-800Flowers.com’s Amit Shah

We’re delighted to feature a guest post from Amit Shah, Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com.  Amit tackles Questions 1 & 2 from The Mobile Playbook.  

For more than 30 years since Jim and Chris McCann started 1-800-Flowers.com, our mission has been rather simple: to deliver smiles. Whether it is a customer sending one of our truly original floral arrangements to celebrate a family member's birthday or a corporate executive sending one of our delicious gourmet food gift baskets to thank a business client, we deliver smiles across thousands of communities every day. Central to being successful in this mission is to make the experience of sending smiles easy. So we have always been at the forefront of whatever technology our consumers adapt and make it easy for them to interact with us whether it is using a telephone to dial our toll-free number, or using a laptop to reach us online or increasingly firing up their mobile phones and tablets to reach us on the mobile web or through an app.

This third wave of change for our business from mobile has been a real disrupter in how quickly we have seen our users embrace it, especially as the penetration of smartphones has rapidly increased in the last few years. This has really sharpened our focus on providing them an outstanding user experience on mobile. So even though we started with a mobile site, we followed it up with rich apps designed for the top three platforms used by a majority of our users. Along the way we realized that the mobile ecosystem allows for adoption across a spectrum of user types and use cases and our ability to meet these expectations while keeping the experience easy is a critical component of our value proposition. For example, power users can leverage our apps for rich functionality like push notifications and set them up to get reminders for an event like Valentine’s Day making it easy to send smiles to that someone special, whereas the more casual users can use their mobile browser and quickly reach our mobile site to also send that smile easily. Or for example, in the case of last minute shoppers, they can leverage our real time delivery calendar functionality on both the mobile web and apps to get same day delivery on the gift of their choice.

The focus on making it easy for our users also means that we are rarely static with our optimization efforts. In spite of having created an award winning mobile experience, we noticed from analytics data and consumer ethnographic studies that our users could be served better so last year we partnered with Moovweb to revamp our entire mobile experience including mobile site and all of our apps. By looking at best practices from around the web and taking a deep dive into the customer experience and functionalities of our old mobile website, we identified the right elements to guide our redesign efforts. The important lesson here is not to just bring all of the desktop functionalities into the mobile experience, but to bring the right elements to mobile that are both useful and engaging for the users.

                        Before                                                                    After

We were especially rigorous in tightening the checkout flow where we eliminated more than half of the steps to checkout from the old experience. Even after we rolled out the new site and apps, we have continued our optimization efforts leveraging analytics data like purchase funnel metrics and qualitative inputs. For example, post-launch, we noticed that our ‘Find a Gift Fast’ functionality was heavily used by our mobile site users and it was buried a click deep on category pages and not on the home page. Through design iterations and testing we were able to move it upstream in the mobile web experience and add it to the homepage itself, thus eliminating even that single click barrier to access. The results from this build, test and iterate model have been exceptional both from business and customer satisfaction metrics alike. As we ramp up our preparations in the next couple of weeks for Mother’s Day, we will continue to make it easier for our customers to leverage our mobile experience. It takes us closer to our mission of delivering smiles– one smartphone at a time. Posted by: Amit Shah, Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com

Thanks for your guest post, Amit!
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The Mobile Playbook: Guest post from 1-800Flowers.com’s Amit Shah
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