Riding the Mobility Wave to Increase Customer Engagement

Transcription

1 NOVEMBER 2012 VIRTUAL THINK TANK Riding the Mobility Wave to Increase Customer Engagement By Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Contact Centers, Frost & Sullivan Introduction Frost & Sullivan recently invited select companies to participate in a new and unique thought leadership forum our Virtual Think Tank. The executives that contributed their opinions and insights hail from a wide variety of name-brand companies: n Tobias Goebel Director of Mobile Strategy Voxeo n Evan Goldman Customer Experience Strategy Manager Southern California Gas Company n Peg Hammergren Director, Customer Delivery T-Mobile n Rod Kassmeier Vice President, Business Solutions CSG Interactive Messaging n Dan Rendler Director, Customer Contact Center Southern California Gas Company n Chuck Quinley Director Investor Services-Call Center Operations TD Ameritrade The Challenges and Opportunities in Combining Mobility into Your Customer Care Strategy This was the third in a series of Virtual Think Tanks in which the discussion focus was around improving the customer experience. In our first Virtual Think Tank we talked about the benefits and challenges of proactive customer engagement. In the second we explored company s self-service strategies. In this third Virtual Think Tank, we expanded our customer experience discussions by focusing on the growing interest and implementation of mobile customer care strategies.

2 Customers Now Drive the Interaction The Mobility Wave For this third in our series of Virtual Think Tanks on customer engagement Frost & Sullivan chose the title Riding the Mobility Wave to Increase Customer Engagement - The Challenges and Opportunities in Combining Mobility into Your Customer Care Strategy to engage early adopter companies in an interactive discussion on a very hot topic within contact centers; current and future mobile customer care strategies. We started our discussion around the meteoric growth in the use of mobile devices by consumers to do all manner of things from searching the internet, buying goods and services, communicating, accessing music and entertainment. In fact, increasingly consumers are viewing their mobile devices as extensions of their lives. As such, they expect to do the same things with these devices that they do at home or work from anywhere, and that also means contacting companies for customer service. The discussion brought about a lot of food for thought. Frost & Sullivan research shows that the growth in mobile and mobile apps is vast in scope, and that a huge number of companies have developed mobile access to their corporate websites. However, true mobile customer care is just starting to emerge, despite the fact that it has the vast potential to improve the way we deliver customer service. The opportunity of companies to dovetail off of this type of consumer adoption is just too appealing to ignore. To level set our discussion, we talked about how mobile customer care is not just mobile access to a company website. Mobile customer care is providing access to customer service, on mobile devices, by using the unique properties of the device, coupled with different interaction channels, such as Web access, chat, SMS and voice, to provide a superior level of customer service for customers that are mobile. We then discussed that as a contact channel mobile has its own set of opportunities and challenges. Mobile Customer Care is not Just Providing Access to a Corporate Web Site Most companies, our panel included, are at the initial stages of developing complete mobile customer care strategies, or have launched one piece, but see it as a critical piece of their overall customer care initiatives. To start our discussion, participants talked about what their goals were for providing mobile customer care. Evan Goldman of Southern California Gas started by saying, We ve put a lot of focus into our selfservice channel. Whether our web, IVR, or mobile channel, we wanted to make sure that we are providing the optimal customer experience, so that as customers cross channels they have as consistent of an experience as possible. He continued with, We re not driven in terms of customer acquisition as much as keeping our costs to serve down and keeping our customer experience good. A lower cost to serve obviously results in lower rates to the customer. One way to do that is by reducing our paper and printing costs which is why our early focus in mobile was around electronic billing and payment. Peggy Hammergren of T-Mobile added, Originally what we were after was to bring some sense of parity to the customer through their mobile device as with existing self-serve and automation. We want to enable customers to do the same type of functions they can do in the IVR or on the Web from their mobile devices. Tobias Goebel of Voxeo took a broader perspective from having worked with multiple companies and their mobile care strategies, by adding, If you look at what a mobile device really is nowadays, it s a computer that sits in your pocket. Over that computer you can place phone calls, you can receive and send text messages, you can Tweet, you can browse the web, and you can run apps. We are really looking at addressing the mobile customer on all these different channels. 2

3 Rod Kassmeier of CSG Interactive Messaging continued by saying, We're seeing the demand shift from channels to increased functionality at the channel level. As an example, we're seeing an improvement in self-service applications by using location-based services to direct callers to the nearest store or dealership versus asking a caller to enter a zip code. For roadside assistance or other emergency calls, this is a significant feature improving the experience by quickly and accurately directing service vehicles to the caller's location. Mobile Capabilities for Customer Care Just as important as what the drivers were behind creating a mobile customer care strategy is how that strategy unfolds. We then discussed what the application allows the customer to actually do with the mobile device to get customer service. Is that using the device for better self-service? Does the application enable the customer to have a better customer experience if they chose selfservice and if they need to reach an agent? And what is the customer call handling strategy if the customer decides they need an agent while using the application? Chuck Quinley of TD Ameritrade, answered by saying, Primarily most of our business happens during market hours which is 9:30 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. This is when people are at work or at school or just going about their daily lives. To have access to your investments and being able to place trades or get market information while you re away from your computer, has almost become an essential in our business. Mobile is a channel that we really invested in early on. We have mobile applications available for virtually all smart phones and tablets. In the past, if our clients wanted to interact with us while they were out and about, they really only had the option to go through our IVR, or talk on the phone to one of our brokers. Providing access to just about as much information as we would give them on our website, including streaming news and quotes, and giving them that access whenever they want it, has been very wellreceived We reward them for that because the charges to do trading and investing via mobile are much lower (than IVR or broker assisted transactions). It s our fastest growing channel and has really been booming over the last year and a half to two years. He added, I would say that our clients are able to do about 80-90% of what they could do on our website via our mobile applications. They can deposit/withdraw funds and place equity, option and futures/forex trades. We give them pretty much all of the same access that they would have talking to a live agent or being on our website via our mobile platform. Dan Rendler of Southern California Gas, addressed the issue of getting to an agent, after trying self-service by saying, "Our mobile, and overall self service goal, is to create a seamless customer experience that makes it easy for our customers to do business with us in the channel of their choice. That being said, should a customer find it necessary to reach an agent from any self service channel, agents need to be skilled and prepared to address the customer's need and coach them on future use of the self service channels. Cross channel technology is key, for example, if while on a mobile device a customer needs to speak with an agent, they should be able to do so with little effort and without starting over. Ideally, the agent would know right where the customer left off and have the information needed to address the 3

4 customers need resulting in a positive overall engagement." Rendler also noted one of many challenges service providers have is the proliferation of channels available to their customers and the importance of identifying and developing those that best fit the desired customer experience. Tobias chimed in with an equally important set of criteria, There are two big areas that we re stressing. One big need we see in the industry today is what I like to call the context gap, between the user of a mobile app trying to selfserve and maybe getting stuck at some points and needing help. Most mobile apps today are built with no easy way for customers to get someone to help them and have that someone already know the context of what the customer has already done. What we re trying to really do is bridge that gap through certain technologies such as call-back. A customer can enter their information or their phone number, or maybe the app knows the phone number, and they get a call back by someone who gets the screen pop of the history of what they tried in the app. Another way to do it is within an in-app phone experience. By using a softphone that sits inside of the app, customers can actually start talking to an agent and then, through a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) link between the app and the contact center, ensure the agent has information about the customer such as the profile and history including context of what the customer s recent interactions so they can more quickly provide assistance. There is the potential for really leaving a good impression in terms of customer experience. On the other hand, Rod Kassmeier from CSG Interactive Messaging added, It s kind of an interesting dichotomy because you get back to sort of why people are doing this, and it s really to reduce traffic into the call center. It s probably not so much an orientation toward how do I minimize calls in the call center versus how do I empower my customer to do more. In empowering the customer to do more, the tendency to need to speak to the agent becomes less. Harnessing Device Properties to Enhance the Customer Experience Next we zeroed in on how mobile customer care can provide a different experience for the customer given some of the device-specific properties that can be harnessed to add value to a mobile application. Our panel was asked if they are taking advantage of the unique properties of mobile devices to enhance the application. For example, are you providing any location-based services, voice authentication, etc.? Tobias spoke of various applications that are embellished by using different device capabilities. For example, he said, One of the things that we re also seeing is a trend towards leveraging the capabilities of the device, such as the ability to automatically share location information. Or to be able to use the camera to share product options, aid in trouble shooting, or speed up service. For example, with a prescription refill application, you could take a picture of your prescription barcode. Or in the utilities space, you d think about outbound notifications where you show your customers a map of where power outages are occurring and when they will be restored; things of that nature. It s really a more multi-channeled approach than is typically considered mobile. Evan added, Our strategy is to keep the mobile experience simple. We currently offer a few key features that are helpful to the mobile user. For example, we included a natural gas vehicle refueling station locator which based on your location directs you to the closest place to refuel your natural gas vehicle. 4

5 More importantly, from a contact center perspective, it launches our mobile web site and it does it pretty seamlessly so the look and feel of the user experience is fairly consistent with what you get in an application experience. Peggy also brought up the concept of using voice authentication in applications, and mentioned a very valid point that is ringing true for every company adding channels to their care strategies when she said, We haven t set anything in stone yet but the conversations are beginning to converge from the different avenues in the company that all have skin in that game. At the end of the day they have to come together and decide what they re going to create for the customer experience from all of these different channels. to participate and buy into a common strategy in order to facilitate a multi-channel mobile care application. As a trend we are seeing within contact centers, Frost & Sullivan also recommends that as with other emerging channels such as social media, that companies should early on in the process bring in stakeholders from across the organization, to tie together disparatechannels and data sources. Since the use of mobile is only going to grow, doing so will enable companies to create compelling, sticky, and useful mobile applications that will go along way in enhancing the customer experience. Measuring the Value of Mobility As with the addition of any customer care channel, it is absolutely critical to measure the value of adding new channels. Along those lines the panel was asked how they are measuring the effectiveness of their mobile strategy and what kind of KPIs they are using to refine it. Conclusion Our panel was in agreement as to the importance of providing mobility as a customer care channel, despite the challenges of combining channels, such as these issues of carrying data and context across channels. One of the issues that we ve been talking about at Frost & Sullivan is the challenges of being able to have a seamless application and to let people channel hop. As we discussed in our panel we have a very broad base of customers and some of them prefer to use text. Some of them prefer to use voice. Increasingly, they want mobile web portals and native apps. Sometimes they want to switch between channels depending on their situation. Are they driving? Are they in a noisy environment? Are they multi-tasking during a meeting? A customer might want to mix and match and it brings up a big challenge if you don t have context and if you can t carry the data from channel to channel. The panel also saw the challenge, yet value in getting various stakeholders across the organization 5