Mobile Customer Service at Hot Topic at Call Center Week
We're just now getting over all the follow-up discussions from attending Call Center Week 2014 in Las Vegas last week! As we expected, mobile customer service was a hot topic, and our Rich Contact Experience feature suite for customer service contact centers was extremely well received!
To recap, in case you weren't able to get to Las Vegas, with our latest release of ServicePattern, we introduced a suite of mobile customer service features, and a mobile API, under the rubric of "Rich Contact Experience."
What this means is that customer care contact centers are no longer prevented from improving the customer experience by decades-old technology that limits customer engagements - in a connected world where everyone has a smartphone with texting, video and still picture capabilities - to basic voice conversations.
We spoke to several prospects who agreed that their customers don't like using IVRs, and their customer experience managers don't like forcing their customers to use IVRs. But, they said, they've never had an alternative.
Until now.
With the mobile API in ServicePattern, brands can integrate the contact center with customer service apps they deliver to consumers for their smartphones. The customer can then reach the contact center via the mobile app, instead of the dial keypad on the telephone app, and, thanks to a sideband communications channel, the app can provide everything the contact center needs to segment and route the call, before it's presented to a representative, and without the caller having to struggle with a complex menu.
Voila! No more IVR.
This feature suite can help the contact center reduce costs too. Inbound toll-free minutes are about the most expensive telecom minutes that brands can buy. And, under the status quo, the meter starts running as soon as the customer is connected to the IVR, and continues running while the customer waits for a representative. Why do brands continue to pay their telecom providers for minutes consumed by playing in-queue music to their customers?
They don't need to do that any longer.
Using the same segmentation and identification features in our mobile API, brands can now consider a variety of cost-saving responses to a consumer initiated inbound call.
For example, the contact center may instead choose to place a less-expensive outbound call back to the customer, immediately upon representative availability. The data collected from the app via the sideband communications channel can be used to inform the representative of the reason for the customer's call before they speak to him or her. This saves money and time. (And, of course, time is always money.)
Or, for lower value customers, and less intensive engagements, the contact center may choose to re-route the inbound inquiry to a live web chat, an e-mail, or even a text message exchange. This can improve the customer experience by minimizing the amount of time the customer spends with the phone pressed up to their ear, listening to music, while waiting for a live representative to speak with.
The possibilities to move beyond the status quo are endless, and they're enabled by the Rich Contact Experience feature suite in our next generation cloud contact center platform.
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