Adopt a Mobile Customer Self Service Strategy

In the age of digital transformation, organizations need to become more customer-centric with a focus on customer satisfaction, customer retention and while maximizing the customer lifetime value. Customers expect an anytime anywhere experience when interacting and conducting business. The move to a mobile 1st interaction model is driving the need to provide greater functionality in mobile customer service applications *** that were previously delivered via traditional web applications or via call center based customer service functions.
One way organizations are becoming more customer-centric is by providing a feature rich Mobile Customer Self Service (MCSS) application platform. MCSS can serve as a consolidated interface to key customer service and commerce interactions with your business. The best MCSS apps can provide a variety of functions that serve as part of a digital interaction continuum – account status, billing status, order history, repeat service requests, customer service access, etc. This MCSS app will complement the web, contact center voice, social media, chat, text, email, and direct sales interactions. Key benefits for utilizing a MCSS strategy and app include:

Increase Revenues

• Increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) by supporting simple repeat buying
• Improve customer experience and customer loyalty
• Increase CSAT and Net Promoter Scores

Reduce churn

• Reduce Operational Costs
• Reduce calls to expensive employee manned call centers
• Solve customer order and billing issues via digital interactions
• Automate frequent customer service issue resolution

So, how does one go about starting down a MCSS journey?

I. Define Your Goals

Defining initial business goals upfront not only provides the framework for organizations to measure success but also design solutions that solve line of business problems. Examples of use cases for MCSS with measurable ROI’s include:

1. Maximize repeat ordering/buying: provide a simple presentation of past orders with the ability to seamlessly repeat which will lead to an increase in repeat orders by 20% with an increase in overall revenue of 5%.
2. Automate customer service functions: through automating the top 5 tasks associated with the live customer call center, reduce the call volume by 5% and avoid call center growth by a corresponding 5% for a savings of $750K a year.
3. **Present invoice and order history: providing detailed history will reduce customer service requirements and billing questions resulting in a 2% reduction in call center growth for $300k/yr and a 2-day reduction in DSO.
4. Higher NPS: overall higher customer sentiment and customer experience compared to CSAT/NPS resulting in a 10% improvement in customer satisfaction and 2% increase in revenue.

II. Where to Begin

The overall digital experience for your customers is critical. Having an overall digital transformation strategy is also important, but most organizations will have Mobile Customer Self Service as a key component of that overall strategy. An organization can create true business value from an MCSS app with alignment to defined, measurable success factors. We’ve seen success with a six-step process to kickoff MCSS implementations. Rapid Envisioning

• Goals
• Mapping Key Steps in Customer Journey to MCSS features
• Visualize a Next Gen Mobile user experience that leverages the unique capabilities of mobile (location, touch, push notification, security, camera, etc.)
• App Deployment/Execution

1. LEARN: A basic understanding of existing customer analytics within the organization is great place to start. Conduct stakeholder interviews and working sessions with business units to understand the use cases that need to be solved. Capture the business objectives and vision and document.
2. ASSESS: Identify the available data sources and infrastructure that exist, assess end-user support requirements and application testing.
3. DESIGN: Create a data hub to ingest the appropriate datasets, design visualization templates and classification models (for unstructured data).
4. DEVELOP: Develop the data integration hub for Omni-channel analytics, develop the industry models and visualization.
5. REFINE: Run and refine the classification models with real-world data, assess the classification quality to ensure data integrity and improve the visualization to meet user needs.
6. DELIVER: Deliver dashboard analytics as a service, assess the results and provide analysis recommendations to the line of business to produce the successful outcome.

III. The Bottom Line

Omni-channel analytics is a proven technique for a modern digital organization to become more customer-centric and better understand their customer’s journey. Whether it’s contacts center voice data, social media, chat, text, email, CRM and sales data, Omni-channel analytics helps organizations reduce operating costs, increase revenues and mitigate risk.
To see these Omni-channel analytics techniques in action, click here.