I experience a number of mobile moments every day and yesterday was no different. In this case, since I’m interested in customer journey mapping and mobile moment plotting, I’ll take you through the mobile moments of my experience with BJ’s Brewhouse.
My husband and I were looking for a place to eat lunch on our lazy Sunday afternoon. We originally wanted to go to a new cafe we’ve only been to once. We couldn’t remember the name of it, but we remembered its location and the fact it was owned by a religious-oriented company. We used our mobiles to figure out the name of the cafe and determine if it was open on Sundays or not. In this case, it’s so new that it’s not on Google Maps yet. We located the restaurant using Facebook Places because I had checked us in via Facebook the first time we were there. And, alas, they are NOT open on Sundays.
Coming up with our Plan B, I vaguely remembered an email BJ’s sent me earlier in the week announcing their new brunch offerings. We hadn’t been in several months, or maybe a year, who remembers? My husband asked me if we had earned any rewards. I quickly brought up the Key Ring App on my iPhone and saw that we have plenty of rewards we can redeem or we can keep holding out until we earn something better.
We get to BJ’s and have to wait to be seated. Not because there’s a line, but because we’re waiting to have our loyalty bar code scanned and they seem to only have one scanner, at the computer screen the other hostess is at, busy on the phone. She must have been coordinating a private party for the owner’s birthday or something because it was a pretty long and intense phone call. Finally, she’s off the phone, we’re checked in, and the hostess is telling us to watch our step.
When we’re seated she puts our loyalty print-out on the table to alert the waiter that we’re loyal customers. I see the paper has spaces for food allergies and favorite dishes. That’s neat! We order our beers, I got the new Oasis Amber and Richard got one of their IPAs. While we wait we notice the table tent promoting their own app for iPhone and Android. I download it. I find my account number off the loyalty print-out on the table and shazam I’m in. I notice we can order ahead, reserve our space in line, pay with our mobile and more. We can do much more than the Key Ring app allows. Finally, we order an appetizer and our main dish, both salads. We commisserate over the wasabi we accidentally ate. Eek! Our check comes and we have $5 off for accessing the app. Bonus!
We don’t pay using the mobile app, but use the regular methods. We’re not in a hurry. But we have determined our next stop will be Home Depot to look for some garden pots. As we leave BJ’s I check my email. (I’m addicted.) BJ’s has already sent me an email confirming our visit and showing our new point balance. That’s efficient!
En route to Home Depot I check my email again and see that BJ’s is now inviting us to be Brewmaster Ambassadors because of our love of their craft beer. I read the benefits and my husband says to go for it.
In order to do this I needed to click the button, and sign in. Well, darn it, I forgot my password! They send an email with a crazy temporary password F56fhSmxY2 or something like that. So there I am sitting in the truck in 108-degree Phoenix heat trying to copy and paste this password from my mobile email to a mobile website, but the copy-paste keeps picking up an extra character.
My husband, growing more impatient says, “Can’t you do this later?” I insist I need to do it then because I’m so close to finishing the process and I know I’ll forget about it later. So another few minutes go by and finally I’m able to get the temporary password entered and change it to something I might remember next time.
This is an example of a mobile moment BJ’s can act on. BJ’s has great mobile options for early check-in, mobile pay, loyalty rewards, etc., but they didn’t think about how the mobile user would deal with their emails and the forgot password process. If they had, the auto-reply would have just clicked out and let me type my new password instead of needing to use a complicated temporary password.
Shown below is a plot of the mobile moments identified through the narrative that involve the BJ’s brand. The format I used is my take on the mobile moments plots that Forrester Research uses in their book, The Mobile Mind Shift. If you get this book, on page 30, is a great worksheet to help you think through defining and designing for mobile moments.