How the Smartphone is Changing the Customer Experience

Smartphones have fundamentally changed how people interact with one another. Communication is faster, more streamlined, and accessible than ever. It’s also transformed how customers expect to make purchases, find information, and interact with brands. To be competitive in today’s market, your team needs to provide a mobile customer experience that matches up with these expectations.

Customers use their smartphone every day to contact friends and family; they’ll feel that interactions with your team can be informal and conversational. This gives your team an opportunity to build on the customer relationship and also makes it easier to share information.

How can you make it easier to solve customer issues? By requesting pictures of the specific issue and providing screenshots that illustrate their directions more clearly.

Your contact center software needs to facilitate these seamless experiences across any device as well as between channels.

This all builds on the mobile customer experience and makes contacting your team that much better. As customers are interacting with their smartphone more than any other device, poor mobile customer experience will cause an unfavorable impact. Customers expect an exceptional experience on their smartphone, just as they would when reaching out to your support in any other way.

Customer experience matters as much as solving the issue

When a customer reaches out to your team via their smartphone, they’re expecting a certain kind of interaction. They’ve customized their device to their specific needs, so the mobile customer experience your team provides needs to be exceptional on top of solving the issue at hand. A streamlined experience ensures that the customer does not feel any friction.

Any differences between smartphone and desktop or voice and chat support will have a negative effect on how customers perceive your company. That’s why it’s important for your team to map the customer journey to support channels.

Customers using their smartphone will also be looking for instant gratification. Your team must provide faster responses to their inquiries or understand when it would be better to move the conversation to another support channel. If the experience suffers, the customer will be less likely to use this method of contact again.

The stakes are higher for smartphones as well; 52 percent of customers are less likely to engage with a company if their mobile customer experience is bad. With the ever-increasing popularity of smartphones, your company needs to ensure that it’s providing the best experience possible.

Sharing information is faster and more streamlined

Smartphones can make sharing information with your team much easier. When your contact center software offers this feature, customers can easily snap a picture, take a screenshot, or verify their identity faster using the built-in fingerprint scanner. This streamlines the transfer of information and gives your team the tools it needs to quickly identify and resolve more customer issues.

If a customer calls in with an issue related to a damaged product, they can easily send over pictures that show the problem instead of having to describe it to your agents. This not only helps decrease the effort it takes for a customer to reach out, but it also cuts down on the need for subsequent back-and-forth questioning to get to the bottom of an issue. When customers and agents have all of this information at their fingertips, it can also decrease the average interaction duration.

UJET fingerprint verification.

With a platform like UJET, you can also use smartphones as a method of verification. The customer can link their fingerprint scanner to their account and use that as verification of their identity. That bypasses the need to verify specific account information that the customer likely won’t have on hand or may not remember. It’s easy to forget what your favorite book was on the day you set up the account or what password you used.

Interactions are more informal and conversational

Customers use their smartphones to connect with friends via social media and messaging apps on the go. Their interactions are threaded through the day in an ad hoc kind of way and your team will need to provide the same kind of conversation. Your customers will expect a personalized experience when they reach out through your app as well.

The ability to interact with your team at any time gives customers a direct line to support as soon as the issue occurs, and your agents need to consider this when talking with customers who are likely to be more animated or frustrated about the issue. Connecting with customers via their smartphone can be informal while still supporting an exceptional customer experience.

When your team is interacting with customers on their smartphone, they’ll need to employ a more conversational tone. Finding the right tone of voice can have a direct impact on how satisfied a customer is with their overall experience. Whether your agents are speaking with customers via voice or live chat, their interactions can be informal and conversational without detracting from the customer experience. That will reinforce the relationship with the customer and help align support interactions with what customers expect while reaching out on their smartphone.

Providing support to customers via their smartphone is your opportunity to make a real connection while still solving their problem. Use this chance to show the kind of personality that won’t come through via live chat or email correspondence.

A bad mobile experience will erode the customer relationship

When a customer reaches out to your team via your app or on their smartphone or mobile device, they’ll expect a certain kind of experience. If their mobile experience doesn’t match their expectations, it can cause friction in the relationship.

Your company needs to provide a great mobile customer experience in order to be successful in the market. Smartphone usage will continue to grow in the years to come and if your company fails to keep up, it can cause irreparable damage to the relationship with your customers.