Recently I was talking with a customer service executive who has run several large contact centers. I asked him where mobile customer care fell on his priority list.
He said, “Oh, I’m paying attention to mobile. It’s definitely on my radar screen.”
I asked, “What exactly have you done about it?”
To which he responded “Nothing yet. I don’t exactly have customers beating down my door asking for mobile customer care today. Most people just call.”
Then I asked a question that stopped him in his tracks.
“How many of your customers are calling you from mobile phones?” He had no idea. (Do you?)
We were curious about that ourselves a few months ago. We handle well over a billion customer service calls a year in our cloud. Those calls are handled on behalf of over 300 enterprises—so that’s a respectable sample of the universe at large. We did the analysis, and this is what we found: More than 70% of our inbound customer service calls are coming from mobile phones. In fact, it was even relatively stable across different types of programs, ranging from 68% to around 73%.
So if our sample of over a billion calls is a good indicator, what does that mean to you?
Your customers are already mobile.
So maybe it’s time to ask yourself the obvious question. What have you really done about it? How have you responded to this change in customer behavior that will have a significant impact on your business?
Maybe you have a mobile app, but chances are if your customer needs assistance, your app just offers a toll free number to your contact center. As soon as you turn that customer’s interaction into a plain old phone call, you’re turning their smartphone into a dumb phone.
Think about it. 70% of your customers are already mobile, and most of them are using smartphones—a platform more powerful many of the desktop computers your customers still use to access your website. A platform capable of a completely new and far better user experience for your customers… a platform that could result in higher loyalty and lower operating costs for your enterprise… and you’re not taking advantage of it yet.
You could be missing a huge opportunity.
Or worse. Your customers are having mobile moments--- that’s why most of them are calling you on their mobile phones. What if somebody else seizes that mobile moment before you do? They might never pound on your door asking for mobile care because they’re too busy paying attention to somebody else in their mobile moment.
So if your mobile customer care strategy consists of a toll free number in a mobile app, don’t turn all those smartphones into dumb phones. Get off the sidelines and seize your customer’s mobile moment—before somebody else does.
