Ovum Research Says Customer Contacts Moving Heavily to Mobile

We all know what mobile adoption has done for game playing and checking e-mail. Most of us even know what mobile devices have done for working outside the office and finding ways to have access to documents from half a world away. What we may not realize is just how much mobile devices are going to impact customer service over the next couple of years. A recent study by industry analyst Ovum (News - Alert) shows how different companies will have their customer service approach changed.

The study says that more than half of inbound customer service calls will be made using a mobile device by 2016 and that 30 percent of those will be coming from some kind of smartphone. Ovum says those numbers are extremely large indicators that the customer service industry is going to be changing big time over the next few years and that the major companies better be getting ready.

“The rise of smart devices and the incessant focus on customer loyalty has created the proverbial ‘perfect storm’ for enterprises that want to reinvent the customer experience around smartphones and tablets,” says Daniel Hong a researcher for Ovum.

Hong added that his company believes that the business community as a whole is going to be taking a massive shift in how they handle their customer service departments. This could mean that call centers will be changed to online chat centers or it could mean that call centers will need to be expanded in order to deal with a higher volume of customer contacts now that they can make contact from anywhere. 

Hong also said that his company’s research showed that a firm that was already adept at changing on the fly was better equipped to handle to handle what was coming from the mobile sector. A company that has quick decision making capabilities will also be better able to get ahead of the game.

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