Is mobile customer care something you should pay attention to or can you ignore it for now? Here are 5 red flags that help you decide if you can wait any longer.
1) You got a high percentage of mobile calls coming into the contact center
A high percentage of calls coming into your contact center from customer on mobile phone suggest your customers have made a shift. That shift is one to greater expectations for speed, ease and experience that mobile brings to the table. Of the 1.5 billion calls we process through our IVR every year, a typical client sees 70% of the calls coming from mobile devices. The expectation of these callers has rapidly changed and your enterprise needs to be ready service them on their terms. You get one red flag for thinking mobile calls can be treated like a regular call. And a bonus additional red flag for not knowing percent of inbound customer service calls come from mobile devices.
2) You offer an 800 number on your mobile app
Great. But reaching customer service through an 800 number is an incredibly poor experience in the mobile world. With an 800 number I have to exit what I am doing in the app, find the 800 number, dial it, and be placed into an IVR queue. Such experience is from the 1990s and will cause more harm than good to today’s mobile customer. What’s needed is a seamless, in-app experience that is context rich. If your organization thinks an 800 number works well for mobile, you get a red flag.
3) You think web chat will work on mobile
Chat was designed to solve problems on the web and should stay there. Mobile customers interact and behave differently than they do on the web. Mobile is full of micro moments compared to a long and dedicated interactions on the web. Web chat on mobile is like when companies just ported over websites to mobile: It sucked. Mobile demands solutions built for the digital world. Score another red flag for trying to force fit web technology to mobile.
4) You think its someone else’s problem
In our experience this is one big red flag. The exec who owns mobile and digital does not understand customer care and thinks the contact center exec will take care of it. The contact center exec wants nothing to do with mobile because it looks like adding another channel to an already complex system. The result: Customer care is left out of the mobile experience. And the experience you give your customers is from the 1990s...or worse. You get a red flag if your contact center and digital execs are not talking regularly about mobile customer care (they don’t have to agree but they have to be talking).
5) You think mobile is just another channel
Do your customers think mobile is a channel? Or is the mobile phone the “platform” on which they run their lives? If mobile contains so much power as to change consumer expectations and behaviors, then why treat it as just another channel? A channel mindset, when it comes to mobile, is a red flag.
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What are the signs telling you?
These red flags are based on our experience working with leading edge enterprises, industry analysts and talking to companies who are, well, "strategically delaying the mobile customer care discussion." Which camp do you fall into?
We think its time to address the mobile customer care problem head-on. We are leading the way with My:Time.
