Businesses in today’s world are always seeking ways to provide great customer service over multiple channels. Creating consistently good customer experiences over telephone, e-mail, chat, social media and Web touchpoints give companies the flexibility to deliver service through any channel according to the customer’s preference.
Thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, companies are now adding mobile to their multi-channel approach. The key to the success of mobile customer service deployment is defining the mobile customer experience (CX).
To create a great mobile CX, companies need to leverage the uniqueness of the mobile platform. Taking advantage of branded mobile apps, IVR and speech-based assistance, location-based capabilities, streaming content and push alerts are just some of the ideas that companies should consider when defining mobile CX.
Unfortunately, many companies still lag behind on mobile, even though half of brands acknowledge that customers search for their products on smartphones and tablets. According to eConsultancy, 36 percent of consumers say that customer experiences provided by companies through mobile devices are either “poor” or “very poor.”
“While brands are providing mobile channels, there is work to be done to both understand and improve the customer experience,” said eConsultancy in a blog post.
Furthermore, many companies are failing to utilize mobile metrics that help them to understand consumer behavior.
“Judging by the responses to our survey, while brands are measuring traffic and devices used by mobile visitors, too few are measuring the kinds of metrics, like behavioral differences, which can help to improve the customer experience,” said the eConsultancy report.
Mobile channels must have high availability, and they must be easy to navigate. Slow page loading, difficulty filling out online forms on mobile devices and screen-sizing issues can all distract from a positive mobile CX. For this reason, companies should dedicate part of their IT staff exclusively to mobile support.
The number of mobile devices in the world will outnumber the global population by the end of 2012. Companies that fail to define and implement a good mobile CX will miss out on many customer interactions and revenue-generating opportunities.
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Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli