Beware, Santa’s on his mobile!

Remember 'Text and Take Home' for Argos – that amazing new service that let us find products and reserve via text which, despite and probably thanks to its simplicity, gathered an impressive take up from day one. It seems a distant memory!

This year will be the first Christmas shopping period where mobile shopping is readily available to us. Avoid the stampede at the shops, browse and buy gifts over your Smartphone, all at a time and place that suits you! Consumers are set to take advantage of mobile Christmas shopping according to IMRG, whose research reveals that 35% of UK consumers will do more shopping on their Smartphones this Christmas.

This year we in the UK will be spending a whopping £7.75bn online in the busy five weeks of the Christmas period (IMRG again), and the fight for retailers to secure customer spend is fiercer than ever. There is a huge variety of channels available for customers to transact or interact with a retail brand. This means that it's even more important for retailers to understand customer behaviour across all touch-points and discover who their customers are and what they want.

Retailers facing Christmas 2011 have the increasing use of mobile devices and online shopping – not to mention social media – as new and very real challenges. The way to respond to this challenge is to make sure you can provide consistent customer service across all channels and devices – whichever channel customers choose to communicate through – whether phone, web chat, email or social media via smartphones.

Companies need to ensure that they provide a seamless experience and gain a 'single view' of the customer by integrating all customer interactions from any channel across all departments. Whether that's marketing, sales or customer service, this same experience needs to be delivered regardless of which channel or device the consumer chooses to use, whether a Smartphone or tablet, Facebook or Twitter.