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As unreal as it may seem, we’re living in a generation where (almost) anything can be bought with a push of a button. Need to pre-order tickets for the new Star Wars movie? Just log on to Fandango. How about playing the latest Call of Duty? It’s only a download purchase away. Best of all? We can get all this and more NOW
Our moms and dads may have advised us about always planning ahead, but they lived in the era of pay phones and beepers. We — the mobile generation — can get whatever we want at whatever time we choose —- whether it’s a meal, a dog-walker, a taxi, or help with packing up for a move.
As exciting as it is to live in an era of instant gratification, learning how to meet these demands can be scary for businesses. Consumers need their goods now and if you can’t give it to them, then they’ll get it somewhere else. For mobile companies already struggling to standout among the millions of apps online, the thought of losing potential customers over a slow user experience can be frightening.
Fulfilling the needs of the “Gotta have it now” generation may appear difficult, but it’s not impossible. Just look at Hotel Tonight, a mobile-only company that focuses on booking the best rooms at the best prices at the very last minute. One of the company’s recent initiatives — offering discounted hotel rooms to guests using location on their mobile phones — was so successful the rates are now available from 6 a.m. instead of midday.
Jared Simon, Co-Founder and COO of Hotel Tonight, spoke with VentureBeat about catering to the instant gratification needs of today’s consumers.
“As a society, we’re becoming much more used to the fact we can get what we want when we want it – and society is demanding more of that instant gratification – and businesses are responding.” Simon said. “As an entrepreneur, your best friend is technological advances that allow you to solve problems that couldn’t be solved before. But there are certain technological advances that go beyond just solving a problem better. They’re technological advancements that change the fundamental fabric of society — and that happens every 10-20 years where we see one of these advancements.”
Simon described the web as one of those advancements, as it fundamentally changed the way society interacted among themselves and with businesses. It provided us with all the information we could ever want at out fingertips and made us more self-sufficient in the process. The transition to mobile is having an even greater change on us, as we expect apps to satisfy our hunger for instant gratification and authentic human experiences — criteria we never considered for websites. It’s why Hotel Tonight focuses on building a lifelong relationship with its consumers, so they’ll continue to use their app in the future.
He also addressed the significant differences between paying on a website versus mobile and how it affects the user.
“The process you go through when you’re on a traditional website and purchasing anything is very different from the process you go through on an app like Hotel Tonight in terms of paying,” Simon says. As he explained, the typical fields required when making a desktop payment would never work on mobile.
“When we started Hotel Tonight in 2010, there were no commerce-focused apps and we had to invent a new way of taking payment on the fly in order to speed that process and make it a mobile experience. It’s the concept of storing an account so it’s one tap to check out and book your hotel, reducing the amount of information we collect form our customers, yet still maintaining the highest degree of security around credit card information.”
“There’s a whole lot of innovation we had to put into the app ensure we could do that. And then the advent of tools like Apple Pay or Google Wallet –allowing customers to store their credit card and literally pay with one tap without loading a credit card in each app — have benefited us tremendously both in terms of conversion and security.”
For more valuable information about the new on-demand economy taking over businesses and how to meet those needs, join this webinar featuring Simon, Terry Angelos of Trialpay, and Sean Behr from Zirx.
Don’t miss out!
In this webinar, you’ll:
- Get insights into the changing consumer landscape
- Learn how successful on-demand companies are effectively addressing customer needs
- Enhance customer experience and offer better deals
- Change the relationship between your customer and the business
Speakers:
Terry Angelos, Co-Founder and CEO, TrialPay
Jared Simon, Co-Founder and COO, Hotel Tonight
Sean Behr, CEO, Zirx
Moderator:
Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
This webinar is sponsored by TrialPay.