With any new technology that eventually goes mainstream, there is always time at which the rate of adoption hits a critical tipping point, and becomes widely accepted. How and why this occurs is of great interest to customer engagement marketers, especially now that most are awash in a deluge of constantly emerging technologies.
The rapid adoption of new mobile technology frequently gives rise to such questions. As more people are using smartphones to conduct almost every conceivable daily activity, brands are constantly seeking ways to integrate mobile into their customer engagement strategy. In order to provide the best customer experience possible, brands must understand what consumers want and what technologies they are willing and excited to use.
Good timing is crucial because if brands are too quick to adopt a certain technology, customers will remain indifferent and unengaged. On the other hand, if brands are too slow to adopt, then other more primly positioned competitors can quickly gain an edge.
The problem is that predictive industry expectations are not always aligned with the reality of current consumer behaviors. But if brands can see where the trends are heading, they may be able to make more intelligent moves along the way.
This was recently demonstrated by a new Compass Plus study that showed a significant incongruity for the industry expectations of a new mobile technology.
Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Compass Plus, a leading digital payment and transactional software development firm, revealed new research that shows that near field communication (NFC) and contactless payment technologies are now projected to reach mainstream adoption and customer usage within five years.
However, this research directly contradicts the previous belief that NFC payment technologies, which work by allowing a customer to hold a mobile device near a small digital receptor to complete a transaction, would already be a mainstream customer experience by now.
Since 2011, Compass Plus has been completing similar research initiatives to assess the industry expectations of the payments market. In 2013, research showed that most experts predicted that NFC and contactless payment technologies would have a firmly established market presence by 2014.
After polling more than 190 payments and financial experts, only 41.5% of the most optimistic respondents now felt that mobile payments would be completely integrated in the region in the next five years. These new results suggest that such NFC electronic payment technologies would not become mainstream until approximately 2020, seven years behind the original estimate.
“It is easy to get excited when new payments technology is introduced,” said Maria Nottingham, Executive Vice President at Compass Plus. “However, experience has shown that no one payment channel becomes mainstream immediately. In the industry we tend to align our expectations with the potential of the technology rather than the consumer expectations. To truly reach a state of mass adoption, consumers need to be on board. It is clear that current approaches to mobile payments are lacking in the versatility that the other methods offer, and this is something that needs to be addressed.”