A few decades ago, conversations with customers were restricted to a few touch points, such as face-to-face services, postal mail, and the phone. Today, contact centers serve customers through different online channels, with the recent game changer being smartphones and tablets. With more than 1.96 billion people using smartphones today and more than half of the world’s population likely to become smartphone users by 2018, mobile devices have become an integral part of life.
Smartphones owe their importance to mobile applications that allow users to fully benefit from the potential of their smartphone. By 2018, mobile apps will likely be downloaded more than 368 billion times, generating revenue of more than $97 billion.
Mobile apps are crucial channels for driving content and services, as well as allowing businesses to communicate and interact directly with their customers. As customers begin to use applications, the data they are continually feeding into a profitable resource, changing the fundamental contact center interaction blueprint with customers.
How Mobile Apps are Changing the Contact Center Landscape?
Anytime, Anywhere Interactions: Customers these days want simple and quick access to information, whether it’s details about a product, purchasing support, finding a location, etc. Contact centers can get in touch with customers via mobile apps and answer their queries directly or have a self-service platform with advanced call support, if required. Customers typically choose companies that offer such convenient interactions, giving the brand a distinct advantage.
Augmented Customer Experience: The customer experience can be improved by conclusively addressing the rich contextual information about customers collected through mobile apps, updated instantly as customers use their mobile phones. Contextual information includes customer data such as account numbers, purchase history, demographic data, customer location, websites visited, past customer service experiences, and other details. This data allows contact centers to be more productive as they can prioritize and personalize discussions. Based on the customer data they hold, they can assign callers to brokers who can best communicate with customers, thus determining the delivery of top-notch services at any given time.
Improved performance: With mobile apps, contact centers can send their customers an easy and short survey after each service or place a call to establish the success of the interaction. Reviews provided by customers are quite essential for the contact center.
Mobile apps that focus on deepening customer relationships, offer accurate customer identification, improve loyalty and satisfaction, and drive higher ROI. Businesses cannot ignore the impact of these applications. For companies that rapidly integrate applications and services, the sky is the limit for specialization and innovation.