Businesses in commerce, banking, insurance, hospitality, telecom, healthcare, and many more are now using mobile as a gateway, enabling customers to use multiple channels to engage with them. Customers can deposit checks through mobile apps, have medical discussions via video, access restaurant menus via QR codes on-site, and much more. Mobile engagement is at the very center of the digital transformation that is taking place everywhere.
Aberdeen defines mobile engagement as firms using any and all of the following modes of communication in CX programs: messaging, chat, web, video, email and social media.
Firms with well-established mobile engagement strategies don't typically consider mobile as a distinct channel. Rather, they see mobile as an engagement hub where consumers can use devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables, to interact with them through myriad channels (phone, messaging, video, web). Those interactions can be more personalized and consistent, given the contextual insights firms can use when managing mobile engagement.
Findings from Aberdeen's research on the topic revealed that leading firms implement and nurture the following three pillars to fuel top-notch and next-gen mobile engagement programs:
1. Build Contextual Awareness of Customer Journeys
One of the core elements of mobile engagement programs is that they are context-rich. In other words, they enable companies to capture and use a variety of contextual insights (e.g., caller ID, geolocation data, voiceprint, fingerprint) so they can tailor each conversation to the unique needs of each buyer and make them consistent across all the channels consumers use to interact with them. However, simply having access to such rich data doesn't mean that firms use it the right way.
Although they have access to the same contextual data, best-in-class firms in Aberdeen's research are 51 percent more likely to use it to build customer journey maps. Those are maps that are dynamic, meaning that they are updated in real time to reflect the most comprehensive and timely views of buyer interactions. Such views enable companies to have a more contextual view of customer conversations, which in turn makes it easier for them to hyper-personalize.
2. Move Beyond Silos to Deliver Truly Seamless Experiences Across All Channels
A context-rich view of customer insights is a great starting place to build the foundation for mobile engagement programs. Once firms establish that, the next steps must be using those insights to hyper-personalize all conversations across all channels. Best-in-class firms use customer journey insights to determine the nature of conversations and use this intelligence to route customers to the channels best suited to address their specific needs. Data also shows that they use journey insights to optimize routing to the right agents if and when the interaction requires agent-assisted support. Firms implement these activities by analyzing historical interactions and operational data to determine the correlation between using specific channels and agents and business outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, first contact resolution , service costs, and handle times.
Root-cause analysis helps reveal these hidden patterns and correlations and helps firms build and manage workflows that route future conversations to the right channels and agents based on contextual insights. Since customer needs and behaviors are dynamic, this process must be the same. This means that firms must automate these activities so historical and real-time insights are regularly analyzed and the algorithms designed for routing make use of the most recent insights to truly hyper-personalize all interactions.
3. Use Analytics & AI for Continuous Improvement.
The third and last step in the journey to build a top-notch mobile engagement program is using analytics and artificial intelligence to facilitate continuous improvements and adaptability to changing business conditions, including changes in buyer needs and behaviors. To do so, best-in-class firms regularly analyze customer and operational data to reveal repeat contacts. This is important as it reveals the type of issues that customers can't get addressed and need to repeatedly contact the business for issue resolution.
The issues resulting in repeat contact can be due to poor data quality, poor internal processes, lack of agent training, lack of technology, etc. Identifying the reasons for repeat contact and then addressing them enables firms to minimize the risk of losing current and potential clients and reduce unnecessary telephony, technology, and labor costs. Firms use root-cause analysis to analyze customer and operational data to reveal these factors. Aberdeen's findings show that the best-in-class are 31 percent more likely to have this capability.
To succeed in business today, maybe your company should as well.
Omer Minkara is a vice president and principal analyst for contact center and customer experience management at Aberdeen.