Interactive Intelligence Provides Mobile Customer Service Solution
Interactive Intelligence Provides Mobile Customer Service Solution by Paul Robinson
Businesses know that communications infrastructure is at the heart of a modern business. It is an essential element in the recipe of providing their customers with a consistent and efficient service across all of their customer contact channels whether by telephone, email, instant messaging or mobile device, whatever is convenient to them. If business processes are not intelligently communication-enabled:
- How will the company be able to respond to customer demands for higher levels of personal service and responsiveness?
- How will it increase customer loyalty and extract maximum value from customer relationships?
- How will it achieve competitive differentiation?
- How will they acquire new customers while retaining existing ones?
With the ascendency of mobile computing, the mobile channel is emerging as the consumer’s primary choice for all possible service venues as it offers anytime, anywhere, any device interaction. And businesses have responded, driven by the opportunity to lower costs and expand customer choice and satisfaction, by offering self-service mobile apps. However, a significant number of customers engaging in self-service end up requiring interaction with a contact center (CC) agent. As a result, successful mobile customer service solutions must seamlessly link the self-service experience with live assistance.
CC vendors are recognizing this, and introducing new solutions to support their various mobile apps. Interactive Intelligence recently unveiled its Interaction Mobilizer solution. Mobilizer is focused on addressing the following IT pain points:
- How do you build these mobile apps?
- How do you maintain them and get them updated on user’s devices?
- And once a customer discovers that she needs to talk to someone, how can situational context behind what she was trying to accomplish be preserved and presented to assist the agent?
With Interaction Mobilizer, Interactive Intelligence is not delivering a mobile app. Rather it is delivering a development and deployment platform to companies who have deployed its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) solution. This platform is a tool kit for developing apps that are customer branded and built with the customer’s company-specific functionality. These apps are all CIC connection-based apps. They have to be connected back to Mobilizer or they don’t do anything. Information isn’t cashed on the device client. It resides on the Mobilizer Server. Given this tight connection, Mobilizer will follow CIC’s deployment venue – either on-prem or in the cloud.
Application development contains two steps. Customers write a shell or very lightweight framework application for each OS – Apple, Android, Windows Mobile and Facebook. Each of these device-focused apps will have one file that has the icon that’s going to show up on the end user’s smartphone along with the connection and login information detailing how it will interface with Mobilizer. It is this lightweight application what gets submitted to the app stores. Mobilizer customers will also write the application residing on the Mobilizer Server. This is where all customer connections with CIC come in to play. At GA during 2Q12 queued callback from the CC will be available. Click-to-call, text chat and video calling will follow later on.
“Web hooks” technology will be used to integrate mobile apps with internal and hosted CRM systems, issue tracking systems, product catalogs, claims management systems, etc. Web hooks are user-defined callbacks over HTTP. These are event-based output mechanisms as opposed to API’s which are request-based output mechanisms. Web hooks are intended to allow Web applications to become more extensible, customizable, and ultimately more useful.
Once the app is written the customer just publishes it to the app stores. In addition, should the customer desire it, it can develop and publish special purpose apps at its internal app store. For example, insurance companies have shown interest in building specialized mobile apps for adjusters, claims assessors, and independent agents as well as clients. Only the client apps would be publically available.
Two types of user login will be supported in the first release – Facebook identity and also by the internal system that’s typically used by banks and insurance companies.
Providing a way for mobile customers to easily reach customer service agents who have contextual information about the customer’s issue is becoming a more important competitive feature of mobile apps as it greatly affects customer satisfaction. In ININ’s case contextual data covers such things as: Who are you? What device are you on? What’s your GPS location? What issue were you working on? What screen were you on when you decided you needed help? All that information is attached as data to the call object that’s sitting in queue. The queue will immediately send back information to the end user’s mobile device saying: “You are nth in the queue, estimated wait time is x minutes. We’ll call you back as soon as an agent is available.” This is great for the user since there’s no sitting in the queue. As the call gets to the top of the queue, it pops up on the agent’s desktop just like any other interaction except for the fact that it’s going to have some more data with it.
Application maintenance in another of those IT pain points that need to be addressed. With Mobilizer there is no need to package anything up, resubmit it to the app store or tell the users to make sure to update the app. All the features and functionality adds, changes, or updates are made in the file on the Mobilizer Server. These are immediately pushed out to all users and instantly available on the next finger press on the app. This is more efficient and less intrusive to the end user. It’s all automatic. You press a button and Mobilizer takes care of it all. The only reason to put out a new app is if the OS manufacturer mandated such action be taken due to a new OS installation.
The bottom line: Interaction Mobilizer is a software platform that enables contact centers and enterprises to rapidly deploy customer service applications on Apple, Android, Windows Phone and Facebook. Mobilizer benefits include:
- Gives organizations a single development and deployment infrastructure for both mobile and traditional forms of customer service for reduced costs.
- Links the mobile customer to the contact center by supplying contextual information to the agent for improved customer service.
- Enables organizations to publish mobile applications while automatically keeping them up-to-date for simplified IT management.
What This Means to You
For Customers: Interactive Intelligence sells into the midsize and large CC market. Midsized CCs are in the 50-150 agent range. Large CCs go up to 5,000 agents. The sweet spot for Interaction Mobilizer appears to be with enterprises having CCs of 500 or more seats with key verticals being insurance, banking and retail. This is a solution designed to strictly appeal to customers of ININ’s Customer Interaction Center as described above. Mobilizer has no value for non-Interactive Intelligence customers. On the other side of the coin, this solution is one of many. For example, there’s Genesys Mobile Engagement, and Nice System’s Mobile Reach.
Mobilizer pricing has two components to it. First of all, there is a onetime server fee similar to the Interaction Dialer or the Interaction Recorder. In addition, there’s a subscription fee based on unique mobile app connections per day.
For Partners: Mobilizer is available through the Interactive Intelligence channel of more than 300 resellers worldwide, and through the company’s direct sales force. Channel partners will get the opportunity to sell Mobilizer as well as sell pro services for deployment, app development and Tier 1 support. An educational track with training and certification for the writing of Mobilizer apps will be rolled out along the lines of that used for Interaction Process Automation (IPA).
Channel conflict is largely avoided by having the direct sales force focus on named accounts. These are large enterprises having a significant global footprint with CCs of over 1,000 agents. Clearly in the initial stages of rollout this customer set is largely made up of expected early adopters. During initial rollout, however, the channel will be in training model so channel conflict should not be an issue.