Given that smartphones are capable of voice communications as well as social media, chat, email and text messaging makes them the ideal mechanism for providing enhanced levels of assisted customer service.
A key differentiator for companies is not whether they have a mobile option available - it's how they leverage it to provide a better customer experience (CX).
View this slideshare presentation to learn:
The business value of delivering great mobile CX
Core capabilities your mobile apps and websites must have
A comprehensive mobile CX strategy that includes click to call, scheduled callback, mobile chat and proactive push notifications
Get more in the FORRESTER RESEARCH REPORT: Manage The Cross-Touchpoint Customer Journey http://gsys.co/VGQWi
2. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 2
How Much Effort Does It Take?
Feel their service provider could
have done something to prevent
them from switching
Customers who switched companies
due to poor service in at least one
industry last year
Customer Satisfaction……
… and ultimately customer loyalty, is often driven by how much effort is required to do business with your company.
Retaining happy customers, willing to purchase again and even recommend your company to others, requires you to reduce the effort necessary to interact
with you during sales and service touchpoints - through a variety of digital channels.
Buying your products and services, checking order status and delivery progress, viewing and resolving account management details – all involve either online
self-service opportunities or personal interactions with live agents.
Companies who do not implement effective processes and technologies to make customer journeys as painless and low-effort as possible leave the door wide
open for competitors to attract hard-won customers away.
Research from Accenture in their 2013 Global Consumer Pulse survey shows that poor service causes customers to switch companies at an alarming rate.
66% 82%
3. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 3
Customer Journeys typically involve multiple touchpoints - but increasingly, it’s the mobile touchpoints where customers either begin
or culminate a journey, because their personal devices are always on and present with them.
It’s becoming a mobile-first world, with more mobile devices in existence than people on the planet, and mobile touchpoints are now the key interaction
channels, according to analysts. As such, your company must focus on making streamlined customer service options available through those mobile devices,
or risk losing opportunities for new business - and potentially losing customers.
Some companies view Mobile as a device; others as a channel. In reality, Mobile is much more than either of those – representing instead a new application
hub which merges communications, social media and cloud resources, to untether people from physical and historical constraints.
Mobile Touchpoints Are Critical
Website Mobile App Contact Center Back Office Branch
Purchase Journey
Onboarding Journey
Account Change Journey
Problem Resolution Journey
Renewal and Repurchase Journey
70%
... of consumers said they
would remain loyal to
retailers because of good
customer service.
- PriceGrabber
4. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 4
Loyalty Lost As Effort Increases
With each mobile interaction, opportunities exist to miss your customers’ expectations for satisfaction - typically because of poor service delivery,
the need to repeat information, transfer to a different channel, or wait for assistance from a live person properly equipped to help.
Even with a 90% customer satisfaction average score at each mobile interaction, as many as one-third of customers could end up dissatisfied across the
entire journey if assistance is not available, not prompt, not personalized or contextual. This leakage of loyalty creates for you a huge risk of customer churn
and reduced revenue if not addressed. The bottom line is – your product quality is what wins you customers, but the service you provide is what
keeps your customers.
100%
90%
81%
73%
66%
Loyalty
Leakage
Average
Interaction
CSAT Scores
90%
90%
90%
90%
Journey CSAT 66%
Consider
Sales
Purchase
Journey Order
Support
Ship
Back Office
Bill
Billing
5. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 5
Low Effort is a Differentiator
Your Company Must Increasingly Find New Ways to Compete – either by differentiating your
products or by providing levels of service that exceed what your customers can get elsewhere. Since
most enterprises offer at least one mobile app to their customers, one of the best and easiest ways to
make an immediate impact on offered service levels is to add contact center capabilities to those existing
apps and mobile websites.
The types of capabilities provided to your mobile customers can also expand differentiation - with chat,
voice, text messaging, email and video interactions all enabling them to use their channel of choice.
Channels must be connected, however, which means that a conversation using one channel can be
continued using a different channel - or sometimes even simultaneously. For example, it is common for
your consumers to be looking at pages on your website at the same time they are speaking to your
service representatives on the phone.
Your competitors are fast embracing this multi-channel, integrated world, with 62% of companies
believing that mobile customer service serves as a competitive differentiator.
-- ICMI, Mobile Customer Service Strategy Research.
75%
of those surveyed indicated that
mobile in-app ability to reach an
agent is important or very important
-- Contact Solutions,
Mobile Customer Care Research,
2013
...one of the best and easiest ways to make an immediate impact
on offered service levels is to add contact center capabilities to those
existing apps and mobile websites.
6. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 6
Business Value of Great Mobile CX
Happy Customers Buy More
Companies see terrific returns and business value when providing personalized, assisted service, focusing
on mobile CX. Customers experiencing low effort and fast issue resolution over their different journeys will
typically repurchase, and usually increase their spending in the process.
The key to reducing customer effort is meeting your customers where they are always present – on their
mobile devices – and delivering levels of service which meet their needs and quickly lead to results they
expect. This includes the ability to reach live agents regardless of what they are doing, using whichever
channel they prefer to invoke that connection. For example - being able to call an agent (or start a chat
session) to get answers to product questions while browsing an ecommerce app invariably leads to
increased sales.
Mobile interactions are now more often the focal point of experience across the entire customer lifecycle.
94% 88%
of customers with
low effort will
repurchase
Source: CEB
of customers with
low effort
increase spend
Source: CEB
The key to
reducing customer
effort is meeting
your customers
where they are
always present.
7. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 7
Establishing a Mobile CX Strategy
Broad Capabilities Drive Mobile CX
Allowing customers to connect during different phases of purchase,
account management and support journeys – using a variety of
methods which add convenience and reduce effort – improves
customer experience and drives loyalty.
Given that smartphones are capable of not only voice
communications, but also of social and Internet connections for
chat, email, messaging and rich media (the exchange of pictures
or videos), makes them the ideal mechanism for enhanced levels of
assisted customer service. Feature phones are history. According to
The Guardian, smartphone penetration is estimated to be 90% by
2016, in the U.S and UK.
Companies which fully embrace all these digital channels, through
a comprehensive mobile strategy to provide personalized assisted
service, set themselves apart from competitors, and keep loyal
customers from considering other options.
Connect Me
8. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 8
Mobile Methods to Reduce Customer Effort
At a minimum, providing these core capabilities in your mobile apps and websites reduces the effort required to do business with you, resolve issues,
and close sales:
Click to Call
Reach An Agent
Sometimes, you just need to speak with a live person - to get a needed answer, or complete a transaction - while
browsing an ecommerce app, or performing account management tasks . Click to call capability from inside your app
or website is the key to making that connection, and reducing the effort needed to wrap things up.
Schedule a Callback
Receive a Call From An Agent
When customers need assisted service, your sales or support agents aren’t always available at that precise moment.
The next best thing is to schedule a callback – either for a specific time, or as soon as an agent becomes available to talk.
Mobile Chat
Quickly Message An Agent
Rather than taking the time to speak with a person, sometimes customers simply wish to pose a brief question before
taking the next step in the journey. Chat is often the fastest way to get those concise answers back to your customers.
Proactive Push
Notifications
Keep Me Informed
Notifying customers of order activity, service outages, and account thresholds - while staying compliant with privacy and
opt-in regulations – is an important part of reducing customer effort, as well as inbound call center volume. Smartphone
push notifications are the best mechanism, as customers control behavior and appearance.
9. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 9
Personalized Service is Comprehensive
Increasingly, customers expect personalized, contextual, assisted service. What exactly does that entail?
You can’t have one without the others. Reducing customer effort means providing them with comprehensive mobile assisted service, which requires that agents
be equipped with information about profile, history and what customers were doing at the point of contact.
Assisted
An agent (either human or virtual)
is ready and available to provide the
service required and resolve the
sales questions or support issues
posed by your customers.
Personalized
At the time and point of contact,
your agent already knows
something about the customer,
being equipped with both profile
information and historical data.
Through this element, segmented
assistance (i.e. better service for
more profitable customers) is also
possible.
Contextual
The agent is aware of what the
customer was doing at the moment
and point of contact. Usually, this
means knowing the page on the
mobile app or website that your
customer was viewing, such as a
product page, service activation
page or account change page.
Often times, the customer’s location
– provided by the mobile device –
is relevant to the issue resolution,
and is also provided to your agent.
10. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 10
Open Integration Lowers Effort
Protecting Legacy Investments
Most enterprises have large investments in legacy back-end, ERP and CRM systems – not to mention the mobile apps and websites themselves, through which
customers connect. Increasingly, web services have become the preferred protocol for cross-platform integration. It is important to choose a mobile engagement
platform which has support for industry standards and the extensibility offered by web services.
A key to reducing customer effort is equipping your sales and support agents with all the information from these disparate systems previously recorded, including
the history of purchases and interactions to date. Regardless of repository, this data informs your agents and ensures that questions are answered and issues
resolved promptly, without your customers having to repeat previous facts or profile information.
Customer Location
and
Contextual Data
11. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 11
Measuring Satisfaction Through NPS®
Net Promoter Score
So how do you measure the success of mobile interactions, reduced customer effort, and overall customer experience?
NPS is a customer loyalty metric developed by Bain & Company, measuring the loyalty that exists between a provider and their consumers. The NPS score
is based on a single question, shown here. By gauging customers’ willingness to recommend you to others, captured by mobile devices immediately after
interactions, NPS helps you assess touchpoints, and set up mechanisms to close the loop - extending your customer service to resolve open issues or blockers
to satisfaction.
Measuring customer loyalty is critical not only to maintaining individual accounts, but also to the broader mission of growth. According to EffectiveUI / ReadWrite,
69% of consumers say that bad app experiences result in a negative perception of a brand, overall.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at
All Likely
Extremely
Likely
Neutral
Detractors Promoters
Net Promotor Score = % Promoters - % Detractors
12. Reducing Customer Effort During Critical Mobile Touchpoints 12
Summary
Lower Customer Effort = Better CX
Mobile touchpoints are often the most important during customer journeys, supporting a broad set
of interactions as consumers move to smartphones as the center of their multi-platform world. Mobile
assisted service which is personalized and contextual creates much happier customers, improving
loyalty and ultimately generating higher revenue.
Reducing effort is the key to better Customer Experience, and agents equipped with
customer profile, history, location and situational awareness are more quickly able to
provide answers to questions and resolve issues.
Low effort and better CX can be a significant competitive differentiator for you
to drive faster growth and stronger loyalty. Having a comprehensive mobile CX
strategy which provides for personalized click-to-call, scheduled callback and chat
capabilities - along with proactive notifications to update and inform - strengthens
customer relationships. This helps you close more sales and generate measurable
gains in customer satisfaction.
Connect
Context
Chat
Callback Location
Alerts
72%
of consumers have a more
positive view of a company if
it provides a mobile customer
service app
-- Parature