Mobile Apps. Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

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1 Mobile Apps Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

2 CONTENTS Introduction...3 About Mobile Apps...4 Customer Centric Apps...4 Mobile Apps in Customer Centric Industries...5 Insurance...5 Healthcare...6 Smart Cities Citizen Attention...6 Utilities...7 Implementing Mobile Solutions...9 Altitude uci Engaging your customers through mobile apps...9 Seamless integration with mobile apps...9 Conclusion References Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

3 INTRODUCTION Mobile is the new way of life. Mobile applications represent a worldwide cultural shift and companies need to support them to engage with their customers. Mobile is quickly becoming a lifestyle, not just a way to communicate, and most part of mobile consumers use their devices to pay bills, read news, shop, or just to kill time. Mobile applications are still maturing but they should completely support the new customer s way of life. The typical mobile user walks from the coffee shop to work with the smartphone in one hand and a cappuccino on the other while checking the account balance at the bank. Mobile apps connect field representatives with tasks, processes, and systems at the company. They also create important business benefits, such as the improvement of staff productivity, offering quality, and cost reduction as the companies offer more and provide a better customer service. According to Forrester, it is the access and convenience of mobile apps and devices that shifts more power from institutions to individuals that did the PC or the Web 1. This fact completely empowers the customer to dictate the rules and will continue to influence the development of the technology necessary to meet customer s requirements. More than one-quarter of the global population will use smartphones in ; however, companies should not just worry about having available apps, but rather ensure that the app is customer centric and keeps the customer in mind. The right mobile app will transform business operations and customer engagement by giving employees, third party, and customers the mobile tools that ease everyone s communication and interaction. Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 3

4 ABOUT MOBILE APPS Smart phones and tablets place power in the pockets of billions of consumers worldwide, including your customers. Contact center mobile applications give a broader view to customer engagement. They join physical context and digital intelligence to deliver a service directly to the customer, adding value and reducing the cost of the company s business service, workflow process, and business application. Nevertheless, engaging with customers through mobile apps requires deep changes to the company s service delivery, technology assets, and ultimately, its business model. However, it s a change companies must make, because customer is king and modern customers are choosing whole new ways to interact with providers. The graph below shows the staggering rise of mobile app revenues in a very short period of time World wide mobile app revenues , billion of US Dollars, rounded up. Source: Statista 3 With mobile apps companies identify the contact to a very detailed level. This enables them to tailor the service provided according to gender, age, personal interests, and other aspects that characterize this specific contact. Moreover, companies can use this data to proactively reach out to customers and in some way, reducing excessive call volume to the contact center, increasing customer satisfaction, and boosting business results. 4 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

5 CUSTOMER CENTRIC APPS Customer centric companies should ask themselves the following: How easy and enjoyable is it to do business with me? If the answer to these questions is positive, companies already have a great payoff: customer loyalty and retention. Retaining and having loyal customers is crucial as modern customers are always connected, have the world at their fingertips, and can easily switch brands at the press of a finger. With the ever increasing number of smart phone users, the number of customers using mobile apps to interact with the contact center is exploding and companies have to cater for these arising needs. Smart phones have become a valuable asset for improving customer service and companies need to create the relevant apps that give their customers the feeling that they do care and value their customers. According to a research by Nuance 4, consumers prefer mobile apps to reach customer service providers for a various number or reasons, such as: 45% 40% 40% 20% 16% say it s more convenient say it s always available say I don t want to wait on hold to get help say it s more personal say I prefer not to talk to a person for some issues The same research found that 72% of consumers have a more positive view of a company if the company has a customer service app. Given the power of these numbers we can say that the availability of customer service apps greatly impact a brand. Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 5

6 MOBILE APPS IN CUSTOMER CENTRIC INDUSTRIES A growing number of companies, such as insurance, airlines, or banks are starting to offer their customers mobile applications to improve customer care. That way they can engage customers at the right time of their journey and provide a customer centric experience. Insurance Insurance companies are currently struggling with challenges such as rising costs and increasingly complex processes for submitting claims. Just like any other business, their main goal is to reduce costs, increase revenue, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately, enhance the customer experience. Mobile apps can help insurers to achieve these objectives, as they are becoming a preferred channel for customer interactions. A report by Capgemini 5 states a few reasons why insurance companies should go mobile: More than 50% of insurers adding mobile and social media over the next two years, have an opportunity to improve customer experiences. The top five key drivers for insurers to invest in the mobile channel are: anytime/anywhere device demands, cross-selling/up-selling opportunities, increased smartphone adoption, customer service costs, and keeping up with the competition. The ROI on investing in mobile within the industry is easily over 30 percent of current claims processing costs. This alone is evidence that insurers should embrace the mobile channel, but more importantly, 20 percent of consumers identify that mobile policy information is critical when selecting an insurance provider. Mobile apps offer the functionality and flexibility that can help insurers overcome their challenges. In addition to displaying insurance policy numbers or policy due dates, insurers can use mobile apps to convey other types of content. For example, integrate marketing, services and sales to reach as many customer touch points as possible. If a customer has doubts about a policy, the insurers mobile app can provide, for example, advice for personal plans. Additionally, the app can remember who the personal insurance consultant of the customer is and offer ways for them to communicate, improving service and consequently, the customer experience with the company. Supporting mobile apps is a great enabler for customer service excellency and profit increase at the same time in a competitive industry such as this. For example, a car insurance company. If a customer has been in an accident, the insurers mobile app should allow the customer to start filling the insurance claim at the accident s site and even use geo-localization to track the place of the accident. Also, the insurance company may send a representative to the site to settle the claim almost in real time. The customer will experience nothing but professionalism, feels valued and unique to the insurance company with the presence of the company s representative, and sees the problem being solved right away. The company also saves a fair amount of money with no wasted time, as claims get solved much faster and more efficiently. 6 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

7 Healthcare The healthcare institutions covers a wide span of different institutions that cover hospitals, clinics, medical exam and diagnostic clinics, pharmacies, and others. And mobile apps can be of great benefit to improve the customer care and business of each of them. The growing adoption of mobile apps has changed clinical practice. For example, professionals rely on apps for important tasks such as information and schedule management, health record and maintenance, communications, information gathering, clinical decision-making, medical education and training, and many others. Mobile apps empower medical facilities with an easy and quick way of improving the care they provide to their patients. People dealing with more serious health problems, such as patients with chronic conditions or caregivers are more likely to engage in mobile health interactions and willing to receive proactive alerts about health or medical issues from their health providers as they have experienced the associated benefits. Medical staff are also avid users of mobile apps to, for example, quickly view a patient s medical history on a house call. The right medical app allows the doctor to view the patient s history or real time test results and make accurate medical decisions with no need to be physically in the clinic. Additionally, the doctor can also use the app to send in a prescription to the pharmacy, simplifying the process and saving time and trouble to the patient. A survey conducted by eclinicalworks 6 found out that: 80% of physicians use smart phones and medical apps. 93% of physicians believe that mobile apps can improve patient s help 25% of physicians are using mobile technology to provide patient care. In addition to all the benefits of mobile apps bring to the relationship of health care providers and patients, they re also a great asset in what concerns the management of the health care facility itself. Apps can improve information flow between medical staff, for example between the doctor that prescribes blood work tests and the doctor at the lab that introduces the results. Mobile apps can also simplify the management of daily activities at health care providers, for example, they can easily replace paper processes with wireless technology, enabling great cost savings and reducing the time for process completion. Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 7

8 Smart Cities Citizen Attention Modern citizens demand fast, effective, and satisfying communications and interactions with their government representatives and services. On the other hand, leisure travelers are using their smart phones to view and consult information when travelling abroad. They rely heavily on smart phone apps to find their way around, and for more trivial things such as finding info on a specific museum or just a bar to chill out after a day s worth of sightseeing. Regardless of whether they re catering for their own citizens or visitors, cities are aware that they must give out a positive impression of services to please their citizens and to keep getting tourists. City councils have started to implement citizen attention programs with the goal to better serve their citizens while at the same time reduce costs. The demand for better, more efficient and flexible customer care also needs to be taken into consideration by city councils, especially as half of the world population lives in cities. Cities have started to invest in social and human capital, infrastructure and technology, enabling sustainable development and promoting quality of life. In the current restrictive economic environment, where everyone is facing severe budget cuts, city councils must find a way to reinvent themselves and find projects that can convince people of the advantages of living in a smart, functional city. If they are successful, they will retain existing citizens and gain new ones, which means a rise in collected tax value, among other benefits that completely justify the investment. Smart city apps improve city living, help economically strained local governments to save money and become more efficient. Mobile apps for smart cities range from something as trivial as a city guide map or digital payment parking (imagine no more coins or meters!) to more complex issues such as environment sustainability programs (pay-as-you-throw) that encourages people to produce less waste or apps that alert to crisis and provide citizens with crucial information. Contact center solutions are an integral part of the citizen attention initiative. Cities set up contact centers as an organizational unit to serve citizens across a range of channels, such as phone, paper, and web. Citizen attention contact centers are becoming the main point of contact for citizens in all matters. Therefore, it is important that they provide their citizens with all the tools necessary to ensure a good communication and an easy and fast way to solve issues. In a not so distant future, every major city will be as easy and functional as possible because no matter what the issue is, city council has an app for that! 8 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

9 Utilities The utilities industry is for sure one of the most important beneficiaries from implementing mobile apps to engage with their customers. Providers for services such as electricity, gas, water, and communications depend greatly on their operational and field staff for reading meters, checking equipment, and so on. In addition to a highly competitive environment, it is very hard to have loyal customers because they can switch providers as easily as they change dinner plates at a restaurant, and tight regulations companies have to really make efforts into increasing the level of customer service. Offering mobile apps is the tool that enables these companies to stay atop of competition and get loyal, brand advocate customers. Mobile apps are a powerful tool not only for utility companies, but also for the customers they serve. They can significantly reduce time and costs associates with serving customers, mainly with operational and field people. For example, they can use mobile application that registers the meter readings and sends the measurements, in real time, to the billing department. This enables the company to issue the utility bill very quickly, and send it to the customer in a shorter period of time. Customers interact very often with their utility companies to do several transactions, such as paying bills, getting information about their account, report problems with the water delivery at their home, among others. Given the fast pace of smart phone adoption, companies can use the mobile apps to improve processes and increase customer satisfaction. Moreover, utility companies can make use of mobile apps to proactively reach out to customers. For example, they can develop a mobile app that integrates with home control devices that help consumers to monitor and control energy usage through their mobile phones. Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 9

10 IMPLEMENTING MOBILE SOLUTIONS Over the last few years Altitude has been working closely with several companies, across different industries to help them integrate mobile solutions into their operations to open new business opportunities, improve processes, and increase results. We are experiencing a major shift towards mobile connectivity at all times, challenging companies on the way they do business and communicate with their customers. Mobility opens a whole new world of opportunities. Mobile devices can be a great tool for employees which have to interact with customers out of the company s premises, such as delivery services, market surveys, or door to door debt collections. Smartphones and tablets are quickly changing the customer service perception and in the near future they will be the primary channel used by companies for customer service. The ability of the mobile apps to capture and store customer information, keep interaction context, and deliver the interaction to the most appropriate agent are some of the features that are very attractive to the customer care business. Keeping interaction context and storing customer information significantly reduce the interaction time, saving time to both the contact center and the customer due to shorter interactions. Mobile apps capability of showing the user s location using geographic coordinates is also a very important feature for some industries, such as insurers or banks. Companies use geographical location to improve customer service; for example, send the customer to the closest branch of the bank if the issue of the customer cannot be solved via mobile app. Additionally, companies can also leverage visual IVR functionality to provide mobile app users with self-service operations, avoiding often times confusing press 1, press 2 options. Mobile apps seamless integration with social media networks, such as Facebook or Twitter, empower companies with a great source of personal information about each of their customers. This additional, free information empowers agents with more knowledge of the customer, greatly improving customer service in terms of quality and time enhancing the customer/company relationship. 10 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

11 ALTITUDE UCI ENGAGING YOUR CUSTOMERS THROUGH MOBILE APPS Altitude s Unified Communication Suite, Altitude uci, helps companies of all industries to integrate mobile apps into their processes to increase their business value and the quality of service they provide to their customers. Seamless integration with mobile apps Altitude uci seamlessly integrates with apps for customers, agents, and management for state of the art contact centers that see mobility as a great opportunity to improve the communication with customers, ease field agent work and enhance management processes. Customer apps Smartphones and tablets have quickly become an integral part of our everyday lives. Well-designed mobile apps can be of benefit not only to the customer but also to the business. Altitude uci, easily integrates information and requests from mobile apps into the contact center. Altitude uci supports visual IVR, call-backs, click-to-call, file sharing and much more. All interactions coming from mobile apps are placed in a unified queue alongside with other media interactions and then, according to priorities and rules, routed to the best suited agent. The agent receives a pop up window with all relevant information about the interaction, for example customer history, data collected by the visual IVR and GPS location. Other features, such as call-backs and scheduled requests are also used to avoid long waiting queues. Additionally, customer apps also feature automatic updates on workflow processes for each individual customer. They are device independent, that is, can be used on Android, ios, Windows Mobile, web apps and social media apps, such as Facebook. All of the interactions from customer apps are placed in a multimedia queue, guaranteeing that they are handled as any other interaction channel. If customers switch channels from mobile to app to voice, for example, the agent that speaks to the customer has the complete record of what has happened up until the moment the call started, as well as a complete view of the customer s prior interactions with the company. This avoids troublesome situations where customers have to repeat endlessly the same issue and on the opposite way, highly increase the customer experience. Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 11

12 Agent apps Mobile devices are a great tool for employees, which have to interact with customers out of the company s premises, such as delivery services, market surveys, or door to door debt collections. Altitude Door to Door is a mobile application created to help perform external interactions with customers. The application is seamlessly integrated with Altitude uci and has a real-time link to the company s systems, guaranteeing always up to date information. It simplifies the interaction administration process for the employees on the field and provides them with a unified customer history and information on contact location, best routes, traffic and weather conditions. Additionally, the application allows management to keep track of their employees through a real-time view on their location and performance indicators. Management apps Tablets have become a widely used management tool. They allow management and operations to control contact center activities and performance from anywhere at any time. Altitude s management application allows better time management as supervisors are not bound to their PCs and can train agents or perform other activities while still being up-to-date with the status of agents, teams, and campaigns on their mobile device. Additionally, the application displays triggered alarms to inform managers of specific situations and allows them to react and make changes on the fly directly on their mobile device. 12 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience

13 CONCLUSION For companies that want to establish a better and lasting connection with customers, mobile is not just another communication channel, it is a requisite. Companies ar e increasingly adopting mobility across different verticals and industries to improve their business and the quality of service they provide. Modern consumers depend on mobile devices for everything and expect to be able to solve whatever issue from them. They not only search for and buy products, but also reach support and service from their mobile apps. Companies must ensure that they provide both, and really excell at support and service apps to positively engage with their customers. A weak mobile customer service is a threat to present and future customer engagement. That is the reason why all companies are realizing the value of mobility in customer service and are actually doing something to support it. References Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement, Ted Schadler and John C. McCarthy, February World Insurance Report 2013 from Capgemini and Efma. February 27, Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience 13

14 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Célia has been part of product marketing team at Altitude for the past 5 years. Her focus area is the improvement of the customer journey and the adoption of customer centric measures for companies to engage with their clients. You can reach Célia at celia.cerdeira@altitude.com ABOUT ALTITUDE Altitude ( is a global provider of omnichannel solutions to deliver great customer experiences. Its solutions help companies and organizations unify all customer interactions and become more customer-centric. Altitude uci (Unified Customer Interaction) is a robust, modular software platform that handles all customer interactions and unifies all touch points, in the contact center and throughout any organization. More than users in 1100 customers in 80 countries use Altitude uci solutions to manage in real time enterprise functions like Customer Service, Telemarketing, Debt Recovery; Help Desk; Citizen Attention, etc. Altitude Software has a track record of 22 years of customer and industry recognition and has won dozens of awards for innovation and tangible results with customers in key markets worldwide. It has 12 offices in four continents, a 160-strong worldwide partner network and is ISO 9001 certified for its worldwide support. Follow us at twitter.com/altitudesoft linkedin.com/companies/altitude-software facebook.com/altitudesoftware 14 Mobile Apps: Advocates of Change for Customer Experience