Transform Customer Service with Mobile Technology

Do you remember 5-6 years back when a good mobile experience was an option? We agree. Today, the minimum is to have a polished mobile experience, which is intuitive and customer-focused. If your business has neglected its mobile strategy, now is the time to look into how it can be improved.

A Great Mobile Experience is Important

A mobile experience that is average will only lead to trouble.

With so many options available, customers won't accept mobile experiences that make them feel confused, frustrated or incapable of accomplishing what they want. Customers who have had a negative experience with mobile are 62% less likely to make future purchases.

Mobile customer experiences built around a good CX can be a powerful tool to win over new customers, improve existing relationships and make people happy. Businesses that are looking to compete and win customers' hearts (and to do so at any level) need to focus on creating a great mobile experience. What to consider.

Improve Customer Service on Mobile Devices

It's only natural that you'd think of your app when thinking about how to improve your mobile experience. You'll want to consider how your customers use it, and what they will do once they have it open.

The mobile experience is not limited to your app. It also encompasses your mobile customer service experience.

Take a look at how people can contact your business via their mobile devices:

Live Chat: Companies that offer live chat area 51% more likely to sell again if the support is available. Live chat, when done correctly, can create a sense of connection with customers. They feel like they are talking to someone that cares. Agents can also access historical data on previous customer communications and purchases, which helps them to avoid repeating questions.
Texting: A survey conducted by Ovum found that the top reason customers use texting for customer service is: it's quicker than using other channels; it's easier than calling the customer service center; it's less annoying than making a phone call and it lets them request a company call back or send a text.

Social Media: A quick response is the most important aspect of customer service in this medium. 42 percent of consumers want to be contacted within one hour. Speed is important on social media. Customers are twice as likely to recommend brands that respond quickly but with little effectiveness than those who provide a slower but more effective response.

Mobile Self-Service Support Empowers Customers

Customers may try to answer their own questions before contacting a service representative. It is more convenient for them to solve their own problems than spend time contacting someone. The better their digital experience will be, the more you make it easy for them to get answers.

UX is a problem for users who are searching for information such as FAQs, pictures, prices, descriptions of products, and other important details.

To improve the mobile experience, it is important to ensure that customers have an easy self-service. You run the risk of losing your customers to other brands that have prioritized mobile. Be sure to:

Make sure that the navigation in your app or mobile landing page is easy to understand.
Reduce the size of your images instead of showing distorted or cropped images.
Align your mobile experience to the customer journey. Identify touchpoints, potential obstacles and provide support wherever and whenever a client may require it.

Design Your App to Focus on Your Users

App experiences can be beautiful when they are built with users in mind.

Your customer will be able to do almost anything they want with a simple swipe. Apps for mobile devices are ideal to collect important customer data based on their location, past purchases and demographics. This allows them to target marketing efforts more strategically. Customer feedback is essential to a great mobile experience. Give them the opportunity to tell you what they think of a mobile application.

This doesn't have to be a limited survey. Normalize conversations with customers. You only need to ask. People will be happy to share the results of months' worth of research.

The Mobile Experience in the Future

It's never boring, is it? It's important to keep an eye out for emerging trends in mobile CX. You don't need to spend time and money on a revamp of your mobile CX if you plan to do so.

The trends of the future are already taking root today. You can think of:

Lighter and Smaller Apps: To provide a purpose-built experience on mobile devices without the need to download another app, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) have become more popular. These PWAs are designed to provide a polished app experience from the browser.
Mobile Payments on the Increase: Fast and convenient. Secure. This could be an area of focus if your mobile experience doesn't facilitate easy transactions. Consumer expectations are likely to grow in this regard.
A more Human Connection: When everything is optimized, tailored and targeted today's interactions with brands can seem robotic. It's important to bring the human element back into engagements with brands. It's about creating those human-to-human connections that will build brand loyalty and increase customer satisfaction.

The Future of Customer Services will be shaped by Customer Service Technologies

1. Face-to-Face Video Communications will Grow

Customers will increasingly look back at real-time, non-video voice conversations as an outdated practice. Video is used by companies asynchronously as "video voicemails" (e.g. Loom or "video conferences" can be used synchronously (e.g. Zoom and video are the future.

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Eye contact is a powerful tool to improve relationships, whether in the workplace or at home. Video can be a great way for businesses to increase their profits. Video voicemails should be used immediately, and all scheduled customer meetings should include a face to face meeting.

2. The Customer will Demand Omni-Channel Service

Customers can interact with you in more than just your brick-and mortar stores. Social media, third-party reviews, and ecommerce are all digital platforms that customers can use to interact with your business.

The need for an omnichannel experience will increase due to the increased accessibility. Multichannel support differs from omnichannel support in that omnichannel brings together all your channels of communication so your team as well as your customers are able to work smoothly between them.

Your service team, for example, can provide support to customers wherever they are engaging with your company. If the issue cannot be resolved on one channel of communication, then your representatives can transfer it to another where they are able to better assist the customer.

It reduces the friction of the customer service experience, as they don't need to leave one interface to enter another to work on the same issue.

You'll have to use a helpdesk as the central mailbox for any customer questions. So, regardless of where a customer interaction begins online, agents can communicate using the same interface.

3. Email will be Replaced by Real-Time Messaging

Email and live chat are dead. Right?

Yes and no. Like video, your customers want you always available. Most prefer chat over email or phone. Facebook Messenger has made us light-years ahead! Facebook Messenger allows you to communicate with companies in real time. It will also show their response rate (and, if it is low, don't bother engaging).

The expectation for real-time communication and responsiveness has also spread to other media. Not only is it expected on Facebook Messenger and Slack, but also on-site chats and conversations. This is a huge change from asynchronous mail and email.

In a world that operates on synchronous time, you'll need to upgrade your communications technologies and strategies. Email is still a great way to send important documents or communicate with customers. Cisin has a tool called 'Shared Inbox,' which allows you to collect and assign all messages received from your customers across different channels.

4. The Future of Remote Work

In the future, customer service representatives will also be able to provide services online.

Instead of being restricted to call centers, reps for service will be able to use more remote working tools. Instead of working in an office, they'll be able to answer customer questions from their own homes.

Most service channels are already available outside of call centers and offices. Most business phone service providers offer cloud-based services that let you work remotely. You can use email, social media, live chat and even operate your smartphone to access these channels. Service reps will increasingly work from home as businesses realize the savings they can make by reducing their office space.

5. Professionals will not be Replaced by Bots and AI

AI, bots. Right, our future robot rulers? Maybe not.

Most "bots", as they are called today, don't have any artificial intelligence. The bots are a collection of branched logic, presented as a conversational user interface. The bots simply provide a new way to interact with existing information. It's a great opportunity for your business. Businesses can use conversational UI to appear at the forefront of innovation.

Do not misunderstand this is a very natural way to interact today, and bots are often quite clever when they're backed up by advanced technology but that doesn't mean it's "artificial intelligence". This is extremely clever math turned into real-world experience. Bots offer two opportunities in the near term:

When you're not available, bots will be there to help.
By providing an inexpensive, repeatable and new method of communication, bots improve the self-service experience for customers and vendors.

In the coming 10-25 years this technology will make even greater advances, and be able to do more than what we humans can today. For customer-facing departments, it will be wise to stay up to date with the bots' progress to offer better services at lower prices.

The use of bots and artificial intelligence will revolutionize customer service. Reps currently spend 90% or more of their workday repeating answers to questions, and helping clients with similar issues.

How about questions that humans are asked to answer in the workplace, which require judgment? Even machines can be taught, trained, or learned from. Reps in the future will have to handle only edge cases, where bots cannot answer questions using a knowledge database or past customer history. When you publish support content in a knowledge base, a robot can then learn to deliver the information repeatedly when customers request it.

Customer support, for example, is the act of engaging customers in a reactive manner. Customer service, on the other hand, is the process of guiding customers with suggestions and adding value. And customer success is the idea that customers can grow and provide an infinite amount of additional value to both their company and themselves.

When bots and artificial intelligence become an integral part of all customer-facing teams, managers will have the opportunity to shift customer service representatives into the Customer Success organization. This is because they will no longer be required to answer the same questions repeatedly, but will instead be needed to help customers gain value and grow from their products and services.

6. Blockchain Technology will Revolutionize E-Commerce Support

Cryptocurrency is unlikely to change the customer experience in a big way, as paying for bitcoins (BTC) after a sale is not much different from paying with any other currency. Blockchain technology can be used to improve the transparency of payments and contracting in future. Smart contracts, which allow machines to execute and enforce contract terms without the need for human intervention, are an evolutionary step ahead of traditional recurring payments.

Imagine a world where smart contracts allow customer success managers to focus on providing value, rather than arguing over payments and searching for money. So although the currency change from USD to BTC isn't likely to become a mainstream thing, nor will it have a big impact on the space, blockchain technology could fundamentally change the face of commerce within the next 25 years, and CSMs, as commercially-involved parties, could change along with it.

7. The Self-Service System will be a Necessity

Self-service is not a new concept. It has been around since the very first user guide. As mentioned earlier, AI and bots offer new possibilities for self-service. Customers and users expect self-service options to be more available than ever. The chart shows that there are many different types of tools available to customers, sorted by their popularity.

What is the reason for this change? Most vendors that the average consumer interacts with nowadays are big and technologically-sophisticated think about Amazon, Facebook, Google, Walmart, big retailers, big banks and so on.

Self-service is a way for these big companies to lower their operating costs, but they are also pushing boundaries in terms of more advanced methods of interaction with customers. Businesses that don't adapt to this new technology will soon look dinosaurus to consumers.

Imagine living in a world with mobile applications that are location aware or messenger bots. It would be strange for a company to not offer self-service options and force you to use old methods like email or phone. Phone and email will soon replace snail mail. Self-service is the culprit this time.

8. Personalized Customer Service Training is Available

Customer service training is traditionally one size fits all. As sentiment analysis software makes it easier to determine each representative's strengths, weaknesses and other characteristics, the training becomes more customized to meet employee needs.

Employees with more technical knowledge will get training to improve their soft skills.

You'll want to ask your team for feedback before, during and after every exercise. Ask for feedback and measure their performance. It will build your reps' trust and create a unique onboarding experience for each of them.

9. Customers' Success Becomes a Differentiator in the Market

In the coming five years, customer satisfaction will be a key competitive advantage, much like today's customer service. It is impossible to ignore the rapid and successful growth of this industry and its impact on companies' quest for customer value. Plus, the concepts of customer success are permeating beyond just the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. The trend is growing and spreading rapidly.

It will be exciting to watch the customer success industry take over when customer success is a standard like it is now. When that occurs, companies will face a new challenge in growing their client list. Established companies with happy customers will raise the bar for all newcomers, as the cost of switching providers is decreasing.

Customer success is also going to be a priority from the start, which will increase startup costs for new companies and reduce margins. Once the curve arrives, it will be a new and exciting set of challenges for companies to keep up. If you are already doing customer service at your business now, then you are ahead of this game.

10. Data-Driven Decisions in Customer Service will Increase

It doesn't matter what service technology you select, there should be a quantitative way of measuring its success. It's impossible to know if software added is effective without this. As companies adopt more service technologies, the customer service team will be increasingly dependent on analyzing these programs.

This shift should result in a significant influx of data that is circulated throughout the customer service department. The service technology collects a wide range of data about the customer interaction, which is used to determine unmet customer needs and roadblocks. The customer support teams and success team then use this information to enhance the experience of customers.

11. Customer Service will Increasingly Rely on Social Media

You can feel the catharsis of a passionate review about your least favorite store or restaurant. We can thank Facebook or Twitter for allowing us to release that tension.

The social media platform has given consumers the power to criticize brands instantly in a public forum. A bad experience with a customer can be captured on video and uploaded online for the benefit of millions. Customers are more likely to believe their friends' reviews than other sources of information, so it is important that customer service departments have a plan in place to respond to complaints.

In order to do this, businesses will need to adjust their social media profiles to deal with customer service scenarios. Businesses will have to develop a plan for managing spontaneous social media interaction, whether it is through a messaging system or by assigning a representative. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are now viable choices for those customers who want to provide feedback.

In the past these options were not even considered for customer service. As social media opens up more outlets for reviews from customers, businesses will have to interact with them on their online territory.

12. The New Technology Creates New Positions in Customer Service

New customer service jobs will be created by new technologies. Virtual assistants will be able to help customers by using augmented reality. The customers will be able not only to simulate the product but also receive digital support as they learn its features.

Specialists will also become more popular. Reps who want to be able to support customers effectively will have to possess specialized knowledge and skills. Reps will dedicate themselves to specific channels to learn the details they need. Chat specialists, Social Media Specialists, and Onboarding Specialists are some of the roles we expect to see.

13. Customers will have Fewer Issues to Solve

This one may sound bad but it isn't.

Customer support cases will decrease as AI and self service resources become more available. The reason is that smaller and less complex problems can be resolved by the customer, or service technologies.

Does that mean I can now fire my customer service team? No! This extra time will allow your reps to concentrate on more complex product and service issues. This allows for a much more personal interaction with your customers. Customer service representatives can avoid expensive mistakes by being thorough and not feeling pressured to keep up with a large caseload.

Your product specialists can also spend more time on improving your service or product, as more cases are resolved by the front line customer service. Engineers and product designers can spend their time on innovation instead of customer service.

14. Frontline Customer Service Representatives will be Flexible and Empathic

The new technology will empower the customer service representatives and provide them with all of the tools necessary to be successful in their roles. The customer service reps will spend less time on standard operating procedures and focus more on the needs of their clients.

Customer service staff will be more flexible and empathic as a result. They'll be more motivated to go above and beyond in providing customer service with fewer friction points.

Conclusions

It's understandable that many SMBs feel overwhelmed by the idea of having to cater to their customers via a brand new platform. Others wonder if the platform is really needed, whether it can help their business or even if they will use it.