Moving To Mobile Customer Service

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

Customer service is changing dramatically as consumers become more mobile and have greater direct access to online information and services. Organizations, both large enterprises and small businesses, will all be affected by the impact of multi-modal smartphones and tablets on traditional telephone-based interactions.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

·        More access to mobile online self-services

·        Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

·        Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

·        Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

The contact center of yesterday must start planning now to accommodate the new technologies that support such interactions for both mobile customers and customer assistance staff, wherever they may be located. Migrating contact center applications for mobile customers will be most cost-efficiently facilitated by moving to “cloud” based hosted and managed services, but “Customer BYOD” needs will also require self-service applications to be designed for device-independence and offer more flexible choices for user interaction interfaces.

Telephone calls are not going to disappear, but voice conversations are being subsumed by other forms of inbound and outbound contacts, including social network postings, text chat, and video calls. As reflected in a recent market study, customers prefer interacting with online applications first, before requiring access to live assistance.

Providing good customer experiences will be key to customer satisfaction and operational support efficiencies, so providing a unified analytics view of all customer contact activities will be critical in designing both personalized self- service applications and live assistance on demand.

Stay tuned as your call center of yesterday evolves into a “Mobile Interaction Center.”

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Telework Dumped By New Yahoo CEO

Copyright (C) Unified-View, All Rights Reserved.

I admit I was very surprised to read about Yahoo's new CEO, Marisssa Mayer, stopping employee's from working away from the office because it doesn't support good "collaboration." Like around the water cooler or at lunch, etc.?

Read comments about this at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/25/richard-branson-yahoo-marissa-mayer_n_2759243.html

This story reminds me of a similar experience that I had in the early days of developing online time-sharing services for the ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet and the World Wide Web. One of the application developer's (Clark Weisman) wife was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, which required her to be completely bedridden for the remaining weeks of her pregnancy. That meant that he had to be at home to take care of her, and therefore might not finish his project as scheduled.

Since the basic SDC Time-sharing System (TSS) was already working for remote access by teletype phone lines, I suggested to the project management that it would be practical to simply put in a new phone line at his home and he could then complete his project online, while taking care of his wife. Management's first reaction was that this was a project that required time sheets to be filled out, attesting to the employee's doing the required work in the office. They were concerned that there would be no way to insure that the employee would be working for the time required.

I pointed out that not only would the normal work hours be put in, but, because the work was being from home, there would probably be more hours expended. Further, there would also be evidence of actual activity recorded by the time-sharing system while online work was being done. Grudgingly, management acceded to my recommendation, and, as I predicted, online work started very early each day and ended late at night. The wife had a successful delivery of a daughter and the online project was also successfully completed.

Of course, there will be "different strokes for different folks" when it comes to what kind of work needs to be done in an "office" environment, so it will be a mixed bag for individual workers as to when they can and cannot work while physically away from a group. So, it's not so much whether it is in an office, but what kind of work is involved and with whom. 

The means of accessing information, interacting with people and online applications has become more flexible with mobile UC, and it is therefore very surprising that Yahoo has taken such a Draconian step. I just heard a news program that suggested that this action was taken as a way to get some employees to quit their jobs and thus reduce the payroll without actually firing anyone directly. Oh, well! 
 
   
 

Mobile Consumers Want UC-Based Customer Services, Not “Collaboration!”

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View – UC Strategies Expert

Organizations interested in unified communications (UC) have focused on how their employees communicated, because such communications could be easily controlled. That is, until multi-modal mobile devices provided greater communication flexibility to end users and brought “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device) considerations into the picture. However, “Consumer BYOD” is also changing how businesses interact with their mobile customers, but in different ways.

While major communication providers have expanded their “UC” role to include “collaboration” (“UC&C”), that label should not apply to customer interactions and services. For more perspectives on this subject, please check out my post on the UC Strategies website.  

Two Views of Mobile Customer Services

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/UC Strategies Expert

If you have been reading technology reports lately, what you will notice is that many UC industry experts are now focusing more on UC for customer services as better source of business ROI rather than just the productivity benefits of employee  “collaboration.”

All business communications have been impacted by user mobility, with organizations trying to adjust to the realities of employee BYOD who want to use a single smartphone (or tablet)  for all their multi-modal communication contacts. The same view is starting to be recognized by the contact center industry about what I have been calling “Customer BYOD.” UC enablement there is an even bigger challenge for supporting customer services, because it affects not only mobile customers, but also customer-facing support staff.

Call centers used to be pretty simple because both callers and agents used a single common form of interaction with voice, the telephone. It got a little more complex for the agents when customers initiated contacts with email and chat. However, contact centers “siloed” these activities, so that while agents had only one modality to deal with, they still shared the same customer information to handle the interactions. With mobile, multi-modal smartphones and tablets, customers can now interact in a variety of communication modes and even easily change modes dynamically, as their mobile circumstances dictate. The question is, can the customer support agent be able to keep up with what a customer can do with a mobile smartphone or tablet?

Start With What The Customer Can Do With a Mobile Smartphone

In any business operation, the customer typically comes first!

So, it is necessary to look at the impact of Mobile UC from a customer’s perspective as the starting point for what the customer-facing organization will face to meet new mobile customer needs. Those needs range from online self-service applications to mobile notifications and alerts that are personalized and authorized by customer recipients to selective contacts with live assistance.

One reason to list the different things a mobile consumer/customer can do when interacting with a business organizations, is to identify the primary means of contact interfaces and options for dynamically switching seamlessly to other connections on demand. That is essentially the key benefit for UC enablement that can be applied to business process applications.

1.  Contact initiation – Unlike traditional telephone calling, where the caller needs to know a specific telephone number, mobile users can benefit from starting with access to an online website, using browser search facilities. Depending upon the user’s current situation, e.g., driving a car, sitting in a meeting, etc., the user can dynamically choose the medium of input and output most appropriate at the moment, i.e., speech or other input and output.

2.  More self-service applications – Once online to a desired website, the mobile user can explore appropriate options to access various types of information and to perform various self-service transactions. 


3.      More selective live assistance – Most customers will only need live assistance on an exception basis, so whenever they reach such a point, that is when they can initiate a contact for live assistance. Most importantly, such assistance can be much more selective and contextual; that is, the customer can choose the mode of contact that is needed, and the context of whatever has been done with self-services, will better determine the skill level required for such live assistance. 

     The fact that a mobile customer is now more accessible and flexible with a smartphone means that the response can include a choice of different options for any real-time connections with live assistance.

4.      More proactive notifications – With more automated business process applications in play, there is now an opportunity to increase operational efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction, by proactively notifying customers of personalized situations that are important and time-sensitive. This will not only reduce problems caused by awareness delays, but can also increase operational efficiencies and people productivity. (Health care, financial, legal, government, and travel vertical markets are good examples.)

The bottom line is that customer services will not necessarily start off with a traditional phone call, but can involve a voice or video conversation when deemed necessary. Needless to say, the real-time connection may be made through new WebRTC protocols, rather than legacy PSTN connections.

How Will Customer-facing Agents Be Affected?

There will also be several things that will change the way that live customer assistance for multimodal, mobile customers will occur because of Mobile UC. These will affect both inbound and outbound contacts with mobile consumers.

1.      Inbound contact mode – First line agents or experts will have to be prepared to interact with a customer in the customer’s mode of contact, voice, IM, text/voice message, chat, video, social network post, etc. Their desktop must provide multi-modal communication capabilities, just like a customer’s smartphone.

2.       Agents won’t have to respond in the same mode – Unless it is a real-time conversation with voice or chat, agents will be able to use different forms of response to a customer contact. Incoming video calls can be responded to with just voice, voice messages can be retrieved and responded to with text, chat can be escalated to voice or video, social network postings can be responded to personally, etc.

3.      Real-time outbound contacts to mobile customers will contextually exploit recipient availability (presence) – Traditional phone call notifications will increasingly be replaced by automated notifications, as noted earlier. Live contacts will be enabled once an automated contact is made and the recipient then wishes to interact with a live person in their choice of mode (Voice, Video, Chat). Therefore, agents must be prepared to communicate dynamically with what the recipient wants, including change modes from chat to voice to video.

4.      When video is involved, agents won’t necessarily have to be “on camera” – Traditional call center agents and “home agents” benefit by not having to be seen, just heard. So, even though video can be exploited, it can be optionally and selectively used in conjunction with a voice conversation. In particular, it will be most frequently used to exchange information, e.g., demonstrate how to do something, show the status of something, etc.

5.      Any real-time connection with a customer can be escalated to an “expert” or authorizing manager – UC enablement will facilitate escalating the customer connection (inbound or outbound) from the agent to an  “expert” or a manager to satisfy the customer needs. As with any access to live assistance by a mobile consumer that can mean responding when such resources are available in a choice of response modes.     

What I described is the future of next-generation interaction centers that will support live assistance, as it will impact customers and the agents that must provide assistance in a mobile, multi-modal world. I haven’t discussed the role of “cloud” based customer services and self-service applications, which will also facilitate management of mobile customers and home agents.

    

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Social Media Needs Mobile UC For Notifications

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/UC Strategies Expert

As defined by Wikipedia, “Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” This definition applies primarily to any form of business interactions, rather than for personal socializing.

However, as people increasingly exploit mobile smartphones and tablets for accessing the Web and for multi-modal communications flexibility, we need to expand that definition to include Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) applications that will initiate contacts with end users through social networks. This is something that IBM is pushing strongly as “Social Business.”

Social networking is primarily a means of posting user-generated information and comments to a virtual community of interest. Members of the community have an option to be notified when a new posting occurs, as well as an option to post a response to the new posting. So, it’s not quite like person-to-person(s) email. However, as is already starting to happen with new capabilities from social networking services, end users are being given options to switch modalities to respond to the person of a particular post, by email, IM, or a real-time voice or video connection. (WebRTC should prove very useful for this!)

So, what we now have is a growing open communication arena based on community content interest relationships, where unified communication (UC) integrations can provide flexible interactions with people in the community, not through a traditional personal address book or organizational directory for person-to-person contacts.

Mobile Social

According to the Wikipedia write-up, mobility is playing an increasingly stronger role in allowing community members to participate while mobile, i.e., by being proactively notified when a new posting of interest has occurred. In effect, mobile communications reinforces the speed of social messaging activities across a common interest of any size community. However, once an individual user is mobile, they will need the flexibility of UC to be notified and respond in the medium that is most appropriate, i.e., speech, text, or even video.

As I have frequently discussed in the past, UC enablement facilitates greater flexibility in initiating and responding to communication contacts with mobile people, and mobile social networking is no exception. Tablet usage increased from 3% to 16% in 2012 and mobile users spend 30% of their time with social networking. Once a user becomes actively engaged in a particularly interesting topic and opts to be notified of new posts, the capabilities of smartphones will allow multi-modal real-time notifications of new post or replies to significantly increase. That’s where the challenge of BYOD comes into play.

The result of such increased social networking activities can be applied to both personal social networking communities or to organizational business groups, and seamless “dual persona” capabilities of smartphones and tablets (e.g., the new BlackBerry “Balance” smartphone software) will be able to keep mobile social networking activities properly separated. However, there will always be the challenge for individual end users to manage their mobile time efficiently. So, as with any form of real-time contacts, social networking notifications must be manageable by the many mobile recipients in a community.

IBM’s Push For "Social Business"

Aside from mobile access to social network posts, there is a bigger role for social networking for business contacts. As note in this very interesting discussion with IBM’s John Del Pizzo, Program Director, Social Communications, and Head of Product Management, IBM Sametime & Sametime Unified Telephony, IBM is using social networking to interact more easily and efficiently with anyone in a community group, inside or outside of an organization.

In a way, it is like “skills-based routing” used in traditional customer call centers, except now it is not a voice phone call connection that has to be made first, and it will be usable by anyone in the community group. As John describes it, “We call it ‘The shift from reach to relevance.’ It’s not about the one-on-one interaction with the people you know that you can reach. It is about the relevant people who can help you regardless of where they are in the organization.”

So, add social networking to the UC enablement list that will impact business communications.

    

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mobile Customer Service Means More Than Multi-channel Connections

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View/ UC Strategies Expert

It’s bad enough that “unified communications” (UC) is still a confusing term for many people, but I am now seeing “multi-channel” customer service also adding to the confusion by some industry analysts describing “mobility” as a “channel” or ignoring “cloud” services as a practical means of implementing customer interactions. Another source of confusion comes from pundits not differentiating access to self-service business applications with communication applications for contacts with people. The communication applications are really “self-service,” too, since customers don’t need someone to initiate a phone call, send an email, post a social comment, or start an IM chat. That’s where UC enablement provides simplified interoperability between the two types of applications.

While there are different modes of contact with people and interactions with self-service applications available to mobile consumers who have smartphones and tablets, each mode is a different “channel” from the user interface and endpoint device perspective. The fact that the network connection (wired, wireless) is the same or different for any type of interaction makes little difference to the user experience (unless it is too slow!).

How Remote Customer Service Is Changing

Customer service is changing dramatically as consumers become more mobile and thus become both more contact accessible as well as have greater direct access to online information and services. Organizations, whether large enterprises or small businesses, will all be affected by the impact of multi-modal smartphones and tablets on traditional telephone-based customer interactions.

As confirmed in many recent market studies, mobile customers are now expecting:

·        More access to mobile online self-services

·        Pro-active mobile notifications and alerts, rather than calling in or checking online

·        Greater flexibility in choice of user interfaces (voice, visual)

·        Options for multiple forms of “smart” access to live assistance when needed

The contact center of yesterday must start planning now to accommodate the new technologies that support such interactions for both mobile customers and customer assistance staff, wherever they may be located. Migrating contact center applications for mobile customers will be most cost-efficiently facilitated by moving to “cloud” based hosted and managed services, but “Customer BYOD” needs will also require self-service applications to be redesigned for device-independence and offer more flexible choices for user interaction interfaces.

Telephone calls are not going to disappear, but the traditional need for voice conversations is being subsumed by other forms of inbound and outbound contacts, including social network postings, text chat, and video calls. As reflected in a recent market study, customers prefer interacting with online applications first, before requiring access to live assistance.

Customer Service Experience Is Becoming More Critical For Business Performance

Providing good customer experiences will be key to customer support, satisfaction, and retention. As applied to self-service applications, it will make a big difference in handling increased mobile consumer needs by minimizing the need for live assistance. So, a unified view of all customer contact activities will be needed in designing both personalized self- service applications and providing live assistance on demand. This is where the benefits of “cloud” based applications and contextual data storage will cost-efficiently support the dynamic needs of multi-modal customer service management.

Copyright © 2013 The Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide