• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 10, 2015

The future is clearly a mobile one. If you haven’t figured that out by now, then best of luck to you.

Still, over the next year, the degree to which mobile will transform customer engagement and envelop other channels is going to take many businesses off-guard. That’s according to a new forecast from Forrester, which put mobile’s ascension in stark terms. 

“As the mobile mind shift speeds up even more in 2016, consumers’ expectations will soar, pressuring firms to better tap contextual data to serve their customers,” Forrester analyst Julie Ask writes in the new report.

As such, “We can expect more companies to treat mobile as core to the whole customer experience [and] not just as a channel.”

Among other reactions, Ask and her colleagues said to expect “an ocean of vendors” flooding into the market that will try capitalizing on the mobile frenzy. This new influx of service providers will either team up with emerging players “as existing ones join forces or die off,” Ask predicts.  

Meanwhile, consumers can be expected to continue spending most of their time with a select few apps.

To that end, broad audiences will “increasingly turn to aggregation apps and a handful of platforms (e.g., Facebook, Google Maps, WeChat) to get the content and services they need,” says Ask.