Last week I was looking for a specific item to cross off my holiday wish list – because let’s be real, tis the season to troll all the sites to get one step closer to finishing your holiday to-do list. In hopes of finding my specific holiday item, I pulled out my iPhone and started Google-ing (yes, it’s absolutely a verb) the product. I scrolled and scrolled, and well, scrolled some more and finally found a site that Google’s tried-and-true algorithm deemed worthy of my click. Perfect, I thought. Wrong.

I clicked the website and a popup immediately blocked my prized product from my view. Annoying, yes, but as a marketer I get it. We’re all about those lead-ins, but that’s beside the point. What was quite frustrating was the fact that I could not ‘x’ out of the popup because there was not an ‘x’ on my screen. I tried scrolling down, then up and the popup would not leave me alone — again, still no ‘x’ in site. Since my holiday stress level was at a strong 7 out of 10, I just couldn’t deal. Call me an impatient Millennial (does that word even have a clear definition? Rhetorical question), I don’t blame you, but I was not about to spend another 15 seconds hunting for a non-existent ‘x’.

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Bye, site. I went back to Google search and picked the next website that had my product available, added it to my digital shopping cart, signed into my PayPal account, and it was ordered. Boom. Easy, enough.

But why should the mobile experience matter to your operations?

Let me explain. You can have top notch customer service and provide quality products for reasonable prices, but when it comes to overall mobile experience – lack it. With the Age of Convenience, convenient, efficient, and seamless experiences mean the most. Even though my holiday shopping experience was just one mobile example, I still chose to spend my money at a different business. That adds up.

Whether you were shopping for your holiday list on your iPhone or taking the metro into the city for a party – the experience plays a huge role in customer loyalty. According to Salesforce, “the high value that B2B marketers place on customer satisfaction and customer retention rates when evaluating overall marketing success reaffirm that building a cohesive journey with 1:1 interactions is imperative”.

When only 23% [ Forrester ] of marketers have created a customer-centric structure over a product-centric, it’s clear that investing in the experience is top priority. The mobile experience plays a significant part of that journey. For the transportation industry, this means getting from point A to point B, efficiently. Heading downtown to do some shopping – plan your metro trip from your smartphone. Don’t have change to feed the vending machine – purchase your transit fare through Passport’s mobile app. Being able to plan, track, and pay for your entire transit experience is great, but the real key is providing a positive mobile experience. Pinpointing user pain points can ultimately make or break the overall user experience.

For the transportation industry, mobile apps are becoming the standard norm for navigating a city. As more and more people utilize apps to get to their destination, providing an experience that makes user lives more efficient is key.