Mobile Apps and SMS Are Paying Off in the Contact Center

Mobile apps received the highest average Net Promoter Score^® at 25 globally, jumping even higher for U.S. consumers at 38 according to the recent NICE CXone CX Transformation Survey. As consumers become increasingly dependent on their mobile phones for all types of interactions, businesses need to be able to support this growing and important medium – ensuring customers can reach them when and how they prefer.

The lowest hanging fruit for self-service for 2019 planning is to make sure that you’ve optimized your mobile app, and mobile friendly website, for quick responses to common customer questions and issues. But pair this with an easy way for customers to reach a live agent, who should be armed with the context from the prior self-service experience, so that both interactions are seamless parts of one customer journey.

Social messaging becomes a channel to reckon with

Believe it or not (and you probably will) your customers are texting your call center number – and millennials and Gen Z are getting angry that you’re not answering! But you could answer. So, why not? We already know that it only takes 1 bad experience for your customers to leave you for the competition.  And, by now we understand that most of our next generation consumers don’t want to talk on the phone – they will text, video (to them this is not a call), or PM/DM/*M, but getting them to do a simple call is, in some cases, like beating your head against a wall. 

So… our recommendation … implement two-way SMS, talk to your customers in their preferred manner – and make their lives, and yours, simpler at the same time.  Leveraging SMS as a proactive notification channel is preferred by many of your customers already today – but we must give them a way to respond.