June 1, 2012
Mobile Multimodal Customers Need UC-Enabled Notifications and Self Services
By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC
Strategies Expert
End users are transitioning from desktop PCs and
telephones to mobile, multimodal smartphones and tablets of their choice, under
the label of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) Initially, BYOD strategies have
been primarily focused on supporting mobile users within an organization who
need access to people and business applications whenever they were not at their
desks. However, BYOD is also being exercised by consumers who are business
customers, and will need to be accommodated by traditional contact center
operations.
IT management has been mainly concerned about the security
of business information accessed by employee mobile devices and is trying to
come up with policies for supporting personal mobile devices that employees
might increasingly use for business applications. That challenge is still being
dealt with in various ways, including “dual
persona” software clients that separate business-related activities on the
mobile devices from personal usage, and Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools
for controlling authorized mobile device access and usage. BYOD mobility policies
have been primarily focused on end users within an organization as a means for
increasing business process performance efficiency, individual end user
productivity, and minimizing communication costs.
However, BYOD mobility is just starting to be recognized
as a key factor in communicating with consumers/customers who are rapidly
adopting smartphones and tablets as their primary means of multimodal
communications. Clearly, organizational “BYOD policies” can’t be applied to
customers who do whatever they want to, but traditional contact center
operations will now have to accommodate mobile customers and the devices of
their choice.
Customer Mobility and “Total Customer Experiences”
There
has also been widespread recognition that customer satisfaction will depend on
their “experiences” in interacting with an organization. Until now, this meant
dealing with customers via telephone calls, messaging, and online self-service
applications, each area usually being supported in separate technology silos.
With UC-enabled smartphones and tablets, mobile users will be dynamically
exploiting all modes of business interaction with a single mobile device that
will let them switch modalities “on demand.” With video conferencing and social
networking options, business communications with customers will certainly
become more complex.
What
that means is that every form of contact between a customer and an organization
must be “unified” in various ways, so that each interface experience will be
individually efficient and effective for the customer’s needs. The “total”
customer contact experience will reflect the individual user interfaces for
communications and self-service applications that will be exploited by a
customer depending on their needs and communication environments. When live
assistance is involved, the “experience” will obviously be also dependent on
the skills of the agent or expert that is providing assistance, as well as the
modality of contact involved.
Given
that most organizations are working with legacy contact center technologies,
the challenge for including support for mobile customer needs is great and
needs to be strategically planned. This is exactly where UC-enablement
technologies and “cloud-based” integrations will play leading roles in achieving
what I describe as the next generation “UC Contact Center” or, better yet, the
“UC Interaction Center.” The latter is more inclusive of automated
self-services that mobile smartphones and tablets will help to increase over
the need for live assistance.
Interface Challenges For Mobile End Users
The
fact that there different types of smartphones and tablets being acquired by
consumers, means there are differences in form factors, as well as different
operating systems that will impact user interface designs, as well as different
integration (API) needs. Because some wireless carriers won’t support “open”
accessibility to all devices and applications they don’t control, is not going
to help matters in dealing with the needs of “BYOD” mobile consumers.
A
logical place for any organization to start their mobility journey to is to
redesign and integrate current online self-service applications to access and
accommodate the smaller screens that mobile consumers will be using instead of
traditional PC desktops. This would include “mobile
apps” available directly from the enterprise network or through “app
stores,” and could include new outbound notifications from business process
applications as well. By also including integrations with communication
applications, i.e., “click-to-contact” live assistance, the basic framework for
mobile customers to access information, the customer will still have options
for contacts with a live person. Such “contextual contacts” will provide
greater efficiencies in handling a customer’s needs, but will not necessarily
change anything for customers who simply want to immediately “talk” to someone
who is available and qualified.
Most
organizations are still perplexed about migrating to an “UC-enabled”
communications environment, when their legacy telephony investments are still
functional. My suggestion is to first fill in the “holes” that are not properly
covered by legacy technology; customer mobility, coupled with BYOD, is one the
biggest revenue impacting “holes” that currently exists.
This post sponsored
by the CIO Collaboration
Network
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