Later this week we’ll be releasing our first-ever report focusing exclusively on mobile in retail. For the past few years, we’ve been asking mobility questions within the scope of our eCommerce, Omni-channel, and Store-based research, but we’ve never conducted a full length Mobile benchmark before. With the proliferation of mobile devices as it is, the timing certainly seemed right, and retailers validated that notion quickly: we were able to attain a quorum of retail respondents in near-record time.

Because of its narrower, deeper focus, the report offers deep and granular insight into the challenges, opportunities, and technologies that retailers perceive right now, and as is expected, their appetites for new uses of mobile technologies are slightly larger than what their budgets – or infrastructure – can currently handle.

Resource challenges top the list of reasons why retailers haven’t seized more of the opportunities they see mobile solutions providing. In ascending order of difficulty, the top-three roadblocks are having the necessary resources to manage all of the available eCommerce and Mobile opportunities (a gating factor reported by retailers in virtually all of RSR’s eCommerce-specific research to date), overall budgetary constraints, and difficulty in quantifying Return on Investment. More problematic, however, are the number of retailers who are frozen in their tracks due to the rapid pace at which mobile technologies change.

This rate of change is not going to slow down; in fact, if a brief history of modern technology teaches us anything, it’s that the rate of change will only accelerate at breakneck speed. Consumer adoption is certainly not going to slow, and the technological capabilities of mobile devices and their users are guaranteed to “hockeystick ” in an upward direction. For this reason, it is imperative that stores understand the mobile, social, and cross-channel opportunities of mobile technologies – currently, 19% of retailers cite this as an inhibitor to forward progress. What then, do retailers self-identify as some primary means to get past the notion that they can wait to implement mobile solutions until a time when the technology is no longer such a moving target?

Much of the answer resides in a role that does not currently exist in most retail organizations: a chief customer experience officer. Sixty percent of retailers admit that a single executive, charged with ensuring the customer has a seamless experience across whichever channel – or technology – she chooses to engage is vital to becoming unstuck. However, as the data will show, the opportunities to get past roadblocks do not stop there.

More coordination between selling channels and the marketing department are fast becoming hot-button issues for retailers looking to embrace more – and better – mobile opportunities (51%). This trend has also emerged in our recent eCommerce, Omni-channel, Merchandising, and Store-based research over the past 12 months as a valid means to overcome internal barriers.

Further, Retail Winners are even more bullish on utilizing third parties to help guide them through the bewildering mobile landscape: 48% of Winners cite high value vs. only 21% of all other respondents in employing third party mobile expertise. Yet in a very interesting data point, while Winners look to third party experts more so than do their competitors, one place they are not looking to for guidance is from the customer, herself. Only 13% of Winners ascribe value to utilizing more customer involvement in mobile development programs; 27% of average and lagging performers look to glean insight from this type of increased customer involvement. Winners are clearly placing their bets, and the future of their mobile strategy, on expert information. As such, Winners perceive that the customer may be just as confused by a future of how they will utilize their personal mobile devices in the shopping experience as retailers are themselves right now.

The full report, Keeping Up with the Mobile Consumer will release this Thursday. We hope you enjoy reading it, and we’ll send out a reminder when it is available for download.