Part III: Supercharge Your Mobile Customer Care Apps

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By Edwin Margulies
(Part III of III)

Get Feedback!

I don’t know too many people that enjoy “taking a survey” at the end of a call center transaction or even in a pop-up window on a web site. Yet more and more, people nonetheless want to broadcast their sentiment. Take all the tweets and Facebook posts on brands and products. Those are “democratic” or at least “free market” forms of feedback. And social feedback is on your customers’ terms.

So what about harnessing the trend towards sentiment feedback and taking the bold step of putting it right in your mobile phone application? Yes that would mean encouraging customers – with standard icons – to make mention of a customer service experience they just had with your firm. Continue reading →

Part II: Supercharge Your Mobile Customer Care Apps

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By Edwin Margulies 
(Part II of III)

Make it Private

Another way to supercharge mobile applications is to establish a private communication channel to the enterprise for customer service. Not SMS – that’s not private the way it is handed-off between aggregator and cell phone provider servers. And you also have to interrupt the application you are using to get to a separate communication application. The smart alternative is to simply drop-in a communication module into your smart phone app.

This has many uses, such as the ability to do simple push notifications that will allow the user to launch or flip over to your app and provide a chat or messaging tab with a status update in it. For example, a flight status update, a service order update, a delivery status update. The possibilities are endless.

Now imagine being able to send messages to your customers via your own Smartphone application and offering a two-way private channel into your contact center. These communications can be set up using IM/Chat protocols such as XMPP – complete with presence and other goodies such as rich media support. The good news is you don’t have to build these capabilities from scratch. You can get drop-in java and ObjectiveC code that hooks you up to the network that does all the heavy lifting.

Continue reading →

Supercharge Your Mobile Customer Care Apps

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By Edwin Margulies 
(Part I of III)

Mobile apps are evolving. And the thrill for practitioners of customer service is they are becoming more service-aware. At first, Smartphone apps were mere stripped-down web sites. But now, the Smartphone modality shows great potential for taking a front seat in customer care.

So what’s missing?

What’s missing from most customer-facing enterprise mobile care applications is real collaboration. That is concierge services, feedback loops, and even private, secure communications.

Continue reading →