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.”

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