A few decades ago, conversations with customers were restricted to a few touchpoints, such as face-to-face services, mail, and the phone. Today, contact centers serve customers through different online channels, with smartphones and tablets being the recent game changer. 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 engage directly with their customers. As customers begin to use applications, the data they continuously channel becomes a profitable resource, changing the fundamental contact center interaction prototype with customers.
How Mobile Applications are Changing the Landscape of Contact Centers?
Interactions anytime, anywhere: Customers these days want simple and quick access to information, whether it’s details about a product, purchase support, finding a location, etc. Contact centers can contact customers via mobile apps and answer their queries directly or have a self-service platform with advanced call support if needed. Customers generally choose companies that offer such convenient interactions, giving the brand a distinct advantage.
Augmented Customer Experience: The customer experience can be enhanced by conclusively addressing the rich contextual information about customers collected through mobile applications, updated instantly as customers use their mobile phones. Contextual information includes customer data such as account numbers, purchase history, demographics, customer location, websites visited, previous customer service experiences, and other details. This data enables contact centers to be more productive by prioritizing and personalizing discussions. Based on the customer data they hold, they can assign callers to brokers who can communicate with customers in the best possible way, thus determining the delivery of top-tier services at any given time.
Improved performance: With mobile apps, contact centers can send their customers a quick and easy survey after each service or 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. Companies cannot ignore the impact of these applications. For companies that rapidly integrate applications and services, the sky is the limit for specialization and innovation.