Everyone is talking about improving the customer experience. Let’s face it – without customers, your enterprise cannot experience revenue and profitability growth. “Solutions” to improve customer experiences are blossoming like desert plants after a rain storm.
Until today. And despite possibly integrating mobility and social networking with contact center interactions, there has been a gap between mobile self-service and live assistance.
What makes today special is an introduction by Interactive Intelligence of Interaction Mobilizer: a new software platform, part of Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center (CIC) all-in-one contact center solution— a single application suite, supported on a single multichannel platform architected for SIP and voice over IP (VoIP).
Available to CIC customers Q2 2012, Interaction Mobilizer allows mid-size to large contact centers to rapidly deploy customer service applications on multiple mobile operating systems, devices and social media websites.
Why this is important—minding the gap
Have you ever wondered why when you open a favorite smartphone app, browse information and have questions you need answered, you’re asked to call a number on the back of an account card or go to a PC and visit the Web site for more help? Maybe you get lucky and there is a click to talk button which more than likely takes you to an IVR that asks you a lot of questions so you can be put in a callback queue.
Have you been confounded by finally talking to an agent who then asks you to walk through the experience you just had so they can “solve your problem”? Doesn’t it seem nuts that those agents have no context for your previous experience?
You are not alone. Smartphones and tablets are rapidly becoming most peoples’ communications device of choice. Popular real estate site Zillow recently said more than 50 percent of site visitors got there from mobile devices and launched a mobile app. And smartphone armed consumers with transactional intent who need information from a real person don’t want to waste time on hold, interacting with an IVR or being asked more questions hoping they are finally connected to the “right” agent.
Your company’s competition is always a click or a great phone experience away. To create opportunity and mitigate the risk of customers becoming somebody else’s the transition from the self-service features of an app to getting live assistance is a gap that is gapping. Its closure will be a game-changer for improving customer experiences.
Enter Interaction Mobilizer
What does this new software platform offer? A look under the hood as stated in the announcement of the solution is revealing in terms of the features:
What does all of this mean?
Interactive Intelligence sums it up nicely.
“In support of providing a unified customer experience and bridging the gap between mobile self-service and live agent assistance, Interaction Mobilizer enables customers to transition from a mobile self-service interaction to a Web callback, click-to-call or text chat,” officials said. “Contextual information – such as the customer’s name, what device they were using, the forms or products they were reviewing, and even GPS coordinates – is transferred to the agent. These interactions can be queued and routed based on agent skill, and information is ‘popped’ onto the agent’s computer screen when the customer is connected.”
And it will get better when video becomes part of the mix.
Speaking of video, the one below provides a good grounding in what Interaction Mobilizer is all about.
From a users perspective, this is almost paradise. Instead of all of that time and effort we spent on navigating an app and all of the time and effort we know we will spend in explaining things to an agent, they’ve got it. Plus, those of us not using a headset on a phone that is even capable of letting use talk and browse at the same time, need not get frustrated.
It is even better from the contact center view. Three benefits are what are important. Interaction Mobilizer:
On top of all of this Interaction Mobilizer provides integration to back-end enterprise systems, as well as the ability to access hosted data in the cloud. And it has a powerful set of analytics that enable administrators to trace mobile app usage data using industry-standard certificate encryption for PCI, HIPPA and other compliance requirements.
Think of it. If you are a CIC customer, you will soon be able to publish a company app to any of the popular app stores for use download by your customers, or even create your own private label app store for use by your partners.
“We developed Interaction Mobilizer to empower companies to more quickly deploy transactional mobile apps that give customers a unified customer service experience,” said Dr. Donald E. Brown, CEO at Interactive Intelligence. Brown is correct actually on his statement about customers on two fronts – the CIC customers of Interactive Intelligence and their customers.
There is a popular saying about the new age where the customer is king not just in marketing hyperbole, but in reality, “It is all about ME!” Empowering contact center agents with all of the tools they need to improve the experiences of customers they interact with is now a top priority of almost any organization regardless of size or location. Being able to create compelling experiences for customers in a manner that is transparent to their channel of choice for interaction is key, and the gap of going from self-service to live agent has been a critical one awaiting a bridge.
This may seem like a small announcement. But don’t be fooled. In the future, companies that cannot make the smartphone and tablet experience seamless for those desiring to move from the Web to a live agent, will do so at a significant risk. This is not just my opinion, you might wish to read what research firm Ovum has to say about the significance of this as well. In fact, as the way they closed their review is a good way to think about this, "They (enterprises) should strongly consider implementing a mobile management solution such as Interaction Mobilizer to make interactions more efficient and leverage the contextual customer information that exists behind the scenes. With some time and experience, it is likely that they will be able to use the data more adventurously, turning the mobile device into a fully fledged, bi-directional customer service portal."