Evolving Customer Service in the Smartphone Era
By Kael Kelly, Senior Director, Varolii
Half of U.S. consumers—over 100 million Americans—own at least one smartphone. As a personal device that can access virtually any communications channel, smartphone owners are increasingly expecting—or rather demanding—that businesses engage with them on their preferred channel of communication.
Leveraging Smartphone Technology to Provide Outstanding Service and Reduce Operational Costs
With this backdrop, contact center executives and managers need an effective mobile strategy to reach and engage customers as smartphone adoption accelerates. Smartphone applications hold great potential in changing the way customer service organizations and consumers interact. However, for many companies, this is new territory and how to leverage smartphone applications that don’t normally fall into the contact center’s domain may not be obvious. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
1. “Wake up” your company’s smartphone application. Today, smartphone applications are user-initiated, not application-initiated—they’re pull applications, not push applications. In a pull model, the company’s application is subject to all the competitive forces fighting for the consumer’s attention: texting, email, Facebook, Angry Birds and other smartphone applications. A better approach is to use a push model—“wake up” or activate the application when something happens that impacts your customer’s relationship with you, and directing an interaction with the customer.
2. Proactively push the information they need at the right time. Using this push model, companies can provide proactive notifications through their company’s smartphone application that improves the usefulness and convenience of that application. Push notifications – text boxes that automatically pop up with relevant, personalized information to that customer – can be deployed to address a number of business problems and touch points such as bill payment reminders, order or trouble ticket status, fraud alerts, appointment reminders, customer satisfaction surveys and much more.
3. Leverage Web applications to simplify development and reduce costs. These push notifications can also be combined with Web applications using new HTML5 technology (which has the feel and functionality of smartphone applications) to interact in a more robust way with customers and provide better service proactively. With smartphone Web applications, consumers are presented with a set of timely communications that provide highly personalized, context-sensitive information through a set of Web pages that focus on a specific situation like an appointment reminder or fraud alert. The user experience improves by getting meaningful, personalized, relevant information and, companies don’t have to spend time and money creating and driving downloads of new smartphone applications – they can just easily create new Web pages as needed and drive customers to visit that URL. For the contact center, this also results in fewer unnecessary incoming calls, higher self-service rates and more satisfied customers.
4. Gain customer opt-ins more easily. Keep in mind that text messaging and calling a mobile phone with any kind of automation requires opt-in permission. The advantage of interacting via your company’s existing smartphone applications is that customers opt-in as part of the download process. This helps meet regulatory barriers while creating a better experience for the customer.
How Does this Vision Become a Reality when Marketing Typically Owns the Smartphone Strategy?
While mobile interactions use smartphone applications and text can be a revolutionary customer service channel, one challenge is that a company’s smartphone application is typically “owned” by marketing. But, contact centers can offer a solution to pain that marketing feels today around the smartphone, while achieving their goals of better customer service.
Today, most enterprise marketing organizations have invested hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in business-to-consumer smartphone application development and promotion, but they’re struggling with application adoption and usage. The ugly truth is that the vast majority of smartphone applications are either abandoned and become “glass trash”—icons that get buried or overlooked on the customer’s device—or uninstalled within weeks of being downloaded. In fact, Localytics, a smartphone application analytics company, found that 25 percent of consumers used a downloaded application only once.
And even if you get consumers to download your company’s application, the abundance of other smartphone applications and smartphone channels are competing for the consumer’s attention. And, marketers face the risk of their applications becoming spam by pushing too many marketing messages to the consumer. This causes many consumers to opt-out or uninstall the application.
So how do you help marketing address these smartphone challenges? With an integrated customer service smartphone strategy, you can turn the application into a valuable ongoing tool for consumers. Customers want tools and interactions that help them better manage their lives and keep them out of troubling situations. This is where customer service, the contact center and the owners of customer experience come into play. These groups know the critical touch points and events that impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. They know the risk points that can create a poor customer experience.
By incorporating proactive customer interactions through the smartphone at these key “moments of truth,” customers benefit and so does marketing and the contact center. From marketing’s standpoint , they can use customer service as the Trojan Horse to improve smartphone application visibility and usage, and reduce application abandon rates. The end result is improved service, higher customer satisfaction, higher “share of glass” on the smartphone, increased customer loyalty and retention and, ultimately, greater brand equity – all of which are vital to marketers and achieving key marketing metrics.
The Takeaway
Your customers are going to the smartphone if they aren’t there already. Partner with your marketing organization and smartphone development team – pitch them on customer service as the vehicle to provide value to your customer base. Leveraging the smartphone as a push and self-service device to improve service can be a winning combination across the organization.
About Kael Kelly
Kael Kelly, Senior Director for Varolii Corporation, brings more than 15 years of experience translating customer needs and market data into the company's overall marketing strategy. Prior to joining Varolii, Kelly held positions in the software and telecommunications industries in market research, product marketing and addressing customer relationship management needs. Kelly earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Oregon. You can reach him at kael.kelly@varolii.com or by phone at (206) 902-3998.