Social CRM & Mobile Care

The relentless increase in smartphone adoption has signaled the beginning of an era that will be dominated by the mobile Internet and this underscores the need for a well defined mobile strategy, which has customer service as its priority.

International Customer Management Institute's (ICMI) 2013 research report, “Mobile Customer Service Strategy: The Contact Center, the Agent and the Challenges of Implementation,” underwritten by Voxeo (News - Alert) appears to confirm this as it highlights the importance of understanding the benefits of developing a mobile strategy beyond 2013.

"We know that smartphone usage among mobile consumers is on the rise, and it's critical that contact center leaders have a strategy to integrate mobile support into their customer touch points," said ICMI's editor-at-large, Sarah Stealey.

One point which clearly emerged was that those contact centers that started planning their mobile customer service strategy early would be best positioned to enhance the customer experience. While 43 percent cited customer service as a priority, 68 percent were sure that it would improve the user experience while an almost identical number felt it could be a competitive differentiator.

"This report offers contact center leaders the key data needed to get buy in and executive-level sponsorship in order to create and implement a successful mobile customer service strategy," added Stealey.

Tobias Goebel, director of mobile strategy at Voxeo, who presented a webinar on the research results along with Stealey, observed that though the contact center industry was aware of the increasing need to support the mobile customer, they were not clear as to what course they had to chart and how to begin.

According to Goebel, only 25 percent of companies currently had a mobile strategy for 2013, hence the potential and opportunity to create a strong competitive advantage was immense. The benefits of implementing a mobile customer service strategy eclipsed all challenges.

The study results were based on the findings from a late 2012 online survey, in which 422 customer service professionals (various levels) from all over the world and from a wide spectrum of industry participated. Voxeo and ICMI are offering a free whitepaper featuring a portion of the survey results.

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