9 min read
If your customer experience program does not have seamless mobile touchpoints you're behind the curve. Read on to learn how to create an exceptional mobile experience for your customers.
A mobile-first mindset is about understanding and optimizing the moments that matter, no matter when or where they might occur. In today’s age, this means user first. A powerful CX program will include a word class strategy coupled with a world-class digital customer experience software platform.
Mobile is arguably the most personal of any channel. It never leaves your side, it’s your connection to friends and family and it’s predominantly used for social interactions. We’ve become accustomed to using our mobiles in a conversational, personalized way – and interactions with brands are no different.
Think of a typical brand interaction, with a set series of questions a user is forced to go through as part of a customer experience survey. It can feel robotic and even repetitive — the polar opposite of almost every other interaction we have with our phones. Imagine instead a more conversational interaction, where a consumer ‘chats’ naturally with a brand as is having a conversation with a friend. It feels natural on mobile and encourages the user to give their honest, open feedback – something which is gold dust when it comes to understanding the emotions and sentiments that drive their behavior.
The ultimate goal of any modern CX program is to provide a crystal ball on customer behavior and move away from just reacting to problems when they occur and towards predicting behavior — for example, customer churn — and then stepping in at the right moment before it becomes a problem. To do that, you need a complete view of the customer across every channel — including mobile. Without it, your picture of the customer is incomplete.
Take retail as an example; we saw earlier how 56% of every purchase decision is influenced by mobile. Without mobile as a part of your customer experience program, you’re missing more than half of the decision-making process – now, would you be comfortable making critical business decisions with that level of certainty? Customer experience leaders bring together their experience and operational data across devices to understand the complete customer journey, allowing them to understand how they combine to create a customer experience and where improvements can be made to have the biggest impact.
We’ve covered how mobile is key in collecting data to understand the customer experience and how, when brought together with data from every touchpoint, paints a rich picture of customer behavior and the sentiments and emotions that drive them. But what do you do with all that data?
Put simply, you embed it throughout the organization so everybody knows exactly what they need to do to provide an amazing customer experience. That means integrating your customer intelligence in the systems and processes you’re already using, making it easy to respond to and close the loop with customers. It means giving everyone in the organization access to the right data to make the decisions they need to improve the experience for the customer.
The right kind of customer data is incredibly powerful but unless you can put it in the hands of the people who can act on it, it’s almost meaningless.
Collecting feedback through mobile is critical – but just how do you do it t make sure you’re making the most of the platform? Here are our top tips for designing feedback mechanisms for mobile:
Start a conversation — mobiles are all about conversation, so design your feedback mechanisms to be more conversational and engage customers on their own terms. You can use advanced branching and artificial intelligence to respond contextually to what they’re telling you. So when they tell you for example that they were not impressed by the staff in your store, ask them a follow-up question about it, just like you would in natural conversation, rather than simply going to the next question in a pre-set routine of standard questions.
Use it when it’s appropriate — mobile is great, but it’s not always the best platform. So think carefully if you’re better off asking them to call to discuss an issue or get support. For example, they may have a complicated question that can’t be resolved in a simple FAQ or short answer from an agent — routing these through mobile is likely to lead to frustration and ultimately failure as they’re unable to complete their task. So think carefully about the user journey and use mobile only where it makes sense.
There are plenty of best practices when it comes to designing a customer survey and, when it comes to mobile, there’s plenty of additional considerations to take into account. There’s three main things to consider:
When designing your survey questions, try to follow the following best practices too:
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