The future of mobile customer experience management

1. Summary

Mobile customer experience management (CXM) involves how a service provider interacts with a subscriber at all the various touch points: from retail to billing to visible marketing campaigns to customer support. With the rising complexity of mobile devices, carriers are increasingly sustaining relationships with subscribers through customer-initiated requests for customer support. Thus the operator’s call center is an important, ongoing opportunity to succeed or fail at delivering a great customer experience.

This report is aimed at wireless service providers, mobile device OEMs, customer support professionals, network equipment manufacturers, cellular retailers, enterprise cellular purchasers, IT, and CIOs. It examines modernized tools for improving CXM and looks at ways of offering an individualized and personal level of ongoing support. It will examine trends in CXM and the future of mobile support and service as well as provide advice to businesses looking to increase their own efficiencies.

Traditional mobile CXM solutions have focused on one-size-fits-all device configuration in the shop, self-service support tools, and over-the-phone walk-through help from a call service representative (CSR). But in the face of the new complexity, existing service offerings are becoming increasingly inefficient. This has led to consumer frustration, longer calls, unsolved problems, increased cost, increasing device returns, declining customer satisfaction, and churn.

New ways of interacting with subscribers show great promise. In an effort to personalize the customer experience, leading mobile operators are using the remote control of smartphones to improve support outcomes, improve the efficiency of CSRs, and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.

Here are a few things to consider:

• There is a perfect storm of customer difficulty with mobile phones because of a confluence of several factors. More-complex devices, fragmentation in the OS and hardware, and more-technology-averse users are coming on board.
• Complicated devices and the difficulty of supporting them have caused dissatisfaction among some users, driving churn and increased returns of equipment.
• Current techniques of customer-experience management are not up to the task. Telephone-based customer support is strained by the added challenges.
• Service providers are turning to web chat, better retail experiences, and remote control of the customer device as newer ways of improving the customer experience.
• Carriers are looking at social networks as ways of building deeper relationships with customers, fixing problems that often go unreported, and managing the brand.
• Remote control of smartphones and devices is a promising method of fixing problems faster by taking the job of interpreter away from the customer.
• Carriers are interested in remote control as a cost saver, a potential marketing tool, and as a way to increase the customer’s satisfaction with the carrier. But they are cautious about implementation, the impact on networks, and privacy concerns.

Thumbnail image courtesy of LDProd/Thinkstock.