Mobility and the Contact Center

In this Industry Buzz podcast, UCStrategies welcomes two guests from Interactive Intelligence to a conversation about mobility and the contact center. Rachel Wentink, Senior Director, Business Automation Group, and Gina Clarkin, Manager, Market Solutions Team, join the conversation led by Michael Finneran and includes UCStrategies Experts Don Van Doren, Bill MacKay, Marty Parker, Dr. Joseph Williams, and Roberta J. Fox.

Michael Finneran: Good day everyone, this is Michael Finneran. I'm here with the UCStrategies experts and with two very special guests from Interactive Intelligence. We have Gina Clarkin, Manager of the Marketing Solutions Team, and Rachel Wentink, Senior Director of the Business Automation Group. They're going to be talking to us today about mobilizing the customer service experience. To get us kicked off, Gina, would you like to tell us a little about where Interactive Intelligence is in this initiative?

Rachel Wentink: Sure thank you. I think that when we talk to customers we see that there's clearly an interesting mobile and in offering customers that mobile channel if that's their preferred way to interact with the organization, but I think that a lot of organizations are very focused on the mobile part and the app. One of the things that we're looking at is really thinking beyond just having an app available and just rolling out an app for your mobile end consumers. Ideally, we believe that any organization wanting to offer that mobile channel should really start with the end in mind and begin with thinking about what does the mobile customer experience need to look like.

Michael Finneran: As companies are starting to think about mobile customer service, where should they start? What should they be thinking about going into this?

Gina Clarkin: Well, we see that one of the things that has a huge impact on the whole mobile customer experience is that customer-facing process behind it. They really need to look at that very carefully, and not just necessarily try to retrofit some existing process that they have in the enterprise and push it into the mobile channel. We really like to look at not just the mobile customer experience, but at what is the mobile use case, and at how that business process would change when geared toward a mobile end user. And then, at a very practical level, what does that end user need to see or access as part of that process.

Michael Finneran: You talk about the mobile customer experience. Is that going to be something that's standard for all companies, or is it tailored to particular organizations?

Gina Clarkin: I think that the answer is yes. I think that with the proliferation of mobile devices, there certainly will be demand on the end-customer side to interact with organizations in that channel. You're certainly hearing a lot about millennials. I don't have the statistics in my head, but I know that SMS is slowly overtaking Web chat as one of the preferred means of communication with the contact center though it's definitely going to be very prevalent. I think that the distinction will be by vertical industry. There are some industries that are highly regulated that will certainly need to take a very different approach to offering mobile channels to their end consumers say, then industries that are generally more innovative or who may not be subject to the same level of compliance regulations and may not be dealing with personal health information or with other types of information like that.

Michael Finneran: Don, in your practice are you seeing an increased emphasis on providing the service in a mobile environment?

Don Van Doren: Thanks Michael. Yeah, we really are. We see a lot of it in our consulting work. What's most interesting to me is sort of the shifts that we're seeing in terms of the kinds of things that are going mobile. I think that we've been doing a good job for some time having tools to create mobile apps, so that people can go in and say, what's my gate for my airline departure, and what's my account balance? We're getting better tools that are integrating things in the smart devices so making an insurance claim through a mobile app, and attaching a picture that's made right there with a Smartphone; visual IVR is another example. So rather than hearing the prompts, you can actually see them on a mobile device.

I think that the real key for this going into the future is moving away from just providing access to different kinds of transactions like that. I think that what we need to do is to really build the capabilities to interact more effectively with the existing customer service channel. So for example, you're inside an app, and you're browsing the web, and you're trying to get help somehow. Being able to contact a rep directly from within the application, and not having to go outside of the existing place where you are, but doing it right from within the app, I think is key.

We have the Mayday thing from Amazon. Well, that's sort of one example, but I think that increasingly, we're going to build these right into the applications themselves. Transmit that right into the rep. It's information about how you are. It also can have the context for what the discussion is, where the customer is stuck and can bring up information to the agent right there, what prior purchase or any other details or history that we know about the customer because you've identified them through the mobile device. So, I think that there are some really creative things that are going to be coming along. There are a lot of other things, too. I mean, location awareness, how do you build that in? Because there are certain situations where if the agent knows where the customer is having that kind of information might be very helpful in dispatching an insurance agent, or a claims agent, for example. Another key thing I think, is what Gina was just talking about with SMS.

We're getting a lot more SMS coming about, but wouldn't it be interesting if the SMS message that comes in could be used as a turnaround device, so being able to click on that and then automatically being in touch with the agent? So we get an SMS that your flight is delayed, it'd be really interesting if that could also say, would you like to talk to an agent right now to reschedule the flight? I think that there are a lot of interesting things like this that are coming about and companies that are dealing with customers really need to understand how to build these applications that are beyond just the kinds of transactions that we've been doing very well today. Thank you.

Michael Finneran: Gina and Rachel, if I understanding it, the idea of making somebody dial a number to get customer service from the mobile phone is now an app from Interactive Intelligence.

Rachel Wentink: It is indeed. I would say that it's exactly the way that it was just described. If you can do it from within that mobile and allow them to place perhaps a call-back request even within the context of whatever that user was doing within that transaction, certainly that's going to help the agent to assist them more effectively than [it is] from the customer's perspective. It's certainly nicer to not have to sit there on hold and listen to all of the messaging and so on and so forth, but to get the call right as you're going to be connected up to an agent.

Michael Finneran: How does the agent's role change with this new mobile environment?

Rachel Wentink: Well, I think that that they have to recognize that the tools that the customer may have are different. I would hope that when an organization enables that mobile customer experience, they're not just looking at (for example), "okay we're going to enable you to talk to the contact center," but also if they have other kinds of web-based functionality, I can go online and say, put in a change of address request or something else along those lines, that they'd have mobile apps for that as well, so that I can talk someone through doing something while they are out and about as well as do it when they're home. The last thing that you want to do is to say well, when you get home, and you get onto our website, then you can do this and this and this.

Michael Finneran: Gotcha. Bill, would you agree?

Bill MacKay: Actually there are a number of things that have been talked about over the last little while which I find kind of interesting, and certainly being able to use the Smartphone is prolific. I came across a statistic, and I thought that it was quite useful. That is that 94% of Smartphone users look for local information on their phone, and 84% of them will take an action as a result. I find that to be a very high conversion rate, but what's interesting, I guess, is that it means that the advertiser or the marketer needs to be able to ensure that they've got clickable phone numbers. I'm wondering if perhaps Gina and Rachel might want to talk a little bit about the importance of click-to-call, and about being able to reach an expert?

Rachel Wentink: I think that that's definitely important because the whole point of the mobile experience is giving the customer what they want, if an organization is in tune with its customers. That's a whole other discussion, but assuming that they are, and assuming that they understand the desires of customers in this mobile channel, absolutely. They don't want to push them out of that mobile experience, so that instead of click-to-call, that they have to suddenly start scrolling around just to find a phone number to contact a human and then to manually dial it. The idea is to just keep that seamless experience, so that it's effortless. They simply click on a link, a call is initiated, and they can connect with a human.

Gina Clarkin: And to touch on your other point there, the idea of the expert? Yes. Not only is it that. I certainly want to talk to someone or however I'm going to communicate whether it's SMS back and forth or other means via my mobile device... I certainly want someone who is knowledgeable, but I may also want to interact with someone who has my same interest, and who may even be in the same age range or in the same region or something else that I share where, if I can on my mobile device know who is available to interact with me, and I can then from my mobile device, not only click to reach out to them, but even hone in and select that very resource that I want to interact with, it can turn into a seamless and very exciting experience for the customer.

Michael Finneran: I was just thinking about Bill's statistic there, that 94% of people look for local information and 84% will act on it. It does make perfect sense. You're not doing idle stuff when you're out and about. If you're picking up your mobile phone, it's for a reason, and something is going to happen as a result. Marty Parker had some ideas about this as well.

Marty Parker: Yeah, I find this conversation fascinating, Michael. Thank you Gina and Rachel for this. First, I'll make a comment. That was very interesting to think about talking with someone who is in the same interest group or in the same age group. It's interesting to watch what's happening with analytics. I may be wanting to talk to the smartest computer that I can find, if you read what IBM Watson and Microsoft Bing and Google are trying to do. We may find that we're getting more artificial intelligence as well as human intelligence. But specifically, I'm finding a challenge amongst our consulting clients Gina and Rachel that I'm hoping Interactive Intelligence is addressing. I'd like to pose the question and ask for your comment.

That is, who is going to have the ownership of this problem? I totally agree that they interface to my prospects and my existing clients especially because then I can say, hey, download my app, and talk to me through my app, and so forth. That's really sticky; everybody wants to do that. Good. And then, I'd like to probably have a way that prospects and people can find me in the social media or wherever and then start interacting with me through some kind of a mobile-device interaction. Fabulous! Got it. But who's going to have the ownership inside of the business? Don Van Doren and I as Unicomm Consulting, we're bumping into this problem, a couple of major banks recently and law firms, some others in education. Telecom has no ownership of this problem. It's being owned by the people who run the intranet or the consumer-facing web pages. It's over in marketing. It's in a different department. Sometimes it was in the line of business at that bank in Canada.

Don and I, we're not seeing the telecom people take ownership. I'm curious [about] how you hope that Interactive Intelligence or [how you] plan for Interactive Intelligence to address this. Will Interactive Intelligence interaction center, does it have these functions built in? Is it easier to create a mobile app off of the Interactive-Intelligence platform? Is it available if I'm using interaction center in the cloud because many of the cloud solutions up there today say, well, you can't do all of the APIs and apps in the cloud, but I suspect that interaction center and the cloud can. Is there any justification for why the contact center management should take ownership of this? Is there any evidence of more revenue or of better customer loyalty or of better reference scores if the customer talks to an agent in addition to interacting with software? So help me to understand this, and help me, so that I can guide our client and [so that] I can talk intelligently about this.

Gina Clarkin: Certainly. You definitely can create the mobile functionality that we've been talking about with the Interactive Intelligence platform. Interaction Mobilizer is a mobile SDK that allows you to drop widgets into various mobile apps to do things such as that functionality that we talked about, the callbacks or even to kick off a business process within our platform, so that you could do that address change request that I had mentioned earlier directly within your mobile app and kick of a business process in our platform as well. So with that, whether it's premise or cloud based, I think that from our perspective, it is relatively easy to do. I'm going to qualify that with this.

You're right that different groups within an organization may own the development of this than who own the telephony platform. So, there are, especially in larger organizations, political considerations in how you work with the various groups. I think that there is something else that we tend to miss. As my team works heavily with our mobile applications, we've run across it. That is that the mindset is very different even from the way that the architecture tends to work. And so, someone who is very comfortable in a client-server world, may not necessarily understand how mobile apps work. So sometimes you'll see people recommend, go (sometimes I've heard it to as), "rent a kid," and bring in someone who is younger and really understand the way that that architecture works. I don't believe that it has to be someone who is necessarily younger, but it does have to be someone who is well versed in that area because it is different.

Marty Parker: Thank you for that. Sounds great. When you're talking about management, I'm starting to think. One of the big areas that always surrounds the context here is analytics. How does the type of information that you need to capture to better manage the environment changes and to start moving to these new tools?

Gina Clarkin: I think that some of the same principles apply. Obviously the contact center is still going to be extremely cognizant of the business metrics for their operations, so even though some of the tools are new, some of the business requirements are still there in terms of tracking and monitoring and providing the contact center supervisors and managers the visibility into what is going on with these mobile interactions just as they would be able to understand what was going on with interactions in any other channel.

Marty Parker: So I'm curious, Gina and Rachel, let's follow up on that question of who owns it with who does it. When you said "rent a kid," I thought of Michael Finneran because he's so young, he really understands mobile, but he can't do all of these things. So let me ask you. Does Interactive Intelligence have a service that will pop in and help your existing clients create these apps? Have you trained your channel to do this? I think that this is a huge opportunity for the channel to convert themselves from simply rack, stack, plug, and play into app creation. I think that it's a big opportunity for them to serve the customer. Is that something that you're doing as the manufacturer, the creator of the software, and are you training your channels for that? Can they rent you instead of renting a kid?

Gina Clarkin: They can indeed. We do have a group that can assist, first with the business consulting, if you will. I mean because the first question to step back and to ask is, what do our customers want to do? What makes sense from a mobile perspective? What can your organization handle? From your internal side, it may change the way that you handle certain kinds of processes. And what does that mean in terms of the human element, if you will? So yes, we can absolutely. We are also starting to work with the channel on that. Now I will say that that some resellers are coming along a little more quickly than others, but there's a lot of interest because of course everybody realizes that in large part this is the way that the world is going now. And so we do have to be aware of the business aspects of it as well as the technical aspects.

Marty Parker: Thank you very much. That's a great expansion on the answer. Michael Finneran and I did a session at Enterprise Connect a month ago that was on this topic of "can you go all mobile?" We concluded that it wasn't quite time that you could just take out your PBX, but it was increasingly the time that for different components of your workforce, different usage profiles, it may be possible to put them on the mobile device and to interface them to the workflow applications in the business. They may not need a phone number as we've known it before. They may not need a DID, and they may not need a desk phone. So we see this changing. It isn't the topic of this call, but it is very related, because if I can do it for my customers and for my clients, why can't I do it for my employees?

Gina Clarkin: I think that the other thing that changes is this expectation of the constant connectivity, so the way that the organization works is very different. The way that our customers expect to be able to connect with us is very different. They're expecting this sort of constant connectivity. So, if I go out on an organization's Facebook page at 7 p.m., I'm not going to sit there and think, "oh wait business hours typically end at 5:00 p.m." If I say something out there and expect a response, I'm not thinking about business hours any longer. It really is a very different way of interacting, and the types of expectations, and so I think that mobility is definitely affecting that. The fact that I've got this computer with me at all times - it may be small, it may just be a Smartphone, but it's powerful, and I expect to be able to do all of these things at all times.

Marty Parker: I think that Don Van Doren has something to comment here.

Don Van Doren: Yes, really interesting points that you're raising because I think so often we've looked at the mobile-application issue as being something that's consumer focused. Certainly that's very true, and it's going to be game changing in my opinion, but at the same time, there are tremendous opportunities for providing employees-facing mobile apps as well as giving remote workers better access to information that they need, scheduling workflow management but including all of the kinds of interactive capabilities that we've been talking about, so the ability to get information and then to say that "hey, I really need to get to the production supervisor because that schedule isn't going to work." And so, from the mobile app, the employee can directly contact the person who they need to interact with to make a change. I think that there are tremendous opportunities in those areas as well.

Michael Finneran: We really haven't done enough for my money as yet on what we refer to as B-to-E, business for employee applications, but B-to-C certainly has played itself out, but yes, using these technology's internal operations has great value.

A question for Gina and Rachel. Can you give us an example of somebody with whom you've worked that you've really seen do this especially well, their approach to mobility?

Gina Clarkin: Well, I think that what I'd like to do is to cite an industry. And of course, I think that retail is one of the ones that is pushing further afield, if you will, where there are all types of possibilities now where it's not only a case of I can look up various objects, various products that I want to potentially buy? I mean, I'll tell you that on a Saturday afternoon when my husband and I are driving around town, I'm on my Smartphone looking at store x, y, or z to say, "okay, now who has this?" because we need to purchase whatever that it is. "Who's got it in stock right now at a store near us?"

You'll find that some of the near-field communications is really affecting what you can do where if you register for certain kinds of programs, and you walk up a particular isle, different kinds of information can be sent to your phone. I'm not sure if it's Macy's or someone else where if you walk in particular areas of the store all of a sudden, it can send you links to videos with people modeling certain types of clothing for instance or other sorts of things like that. So there are a lot of interesting location-based tie-ins that are coming in now because of some of the advances in the technology. I think that we've only just scratched the surface of that capability, not just in retail, but of course out through other industries as well.

Michael Finneran: Yeah, we are seeing an awful lot of interesting things particularly, we call them anonymous cloud sourcing. For example, we have systems now where a retailer can monitor people's Smartphones as they walk past the store, but can also be able to tell what percentage of them commit. Of course then what you do is that you put a big sign up in the window that says sale, and you see how those numbers change. So the fact that we're carrying, well Gina referred to it as a computer, but it's also very much a "beacon" in our pocket or our purse as we travel around today. There are very creative ways of making use of that hopefully without violating people's privacy.

Joseph Williams: I have a question. You guys are obviously familiar with Amazon's Mayday device-level customer support. Your approach is more in app customer support. Which of those models do you think will ultimately prevail? Is there a device play as opposed to the app play, or how is that going to ultimate resolve itself? Because they're both interesting.

Gina Clarkin: Well, they are. It's certainly a value add. So if you look at the whole idea of Mayday, it's General Motors isn't it that has the OnStar capability? That's sort of similar in that you have this extra capability and potentially revenue-generating service in your device. So, I think that there's certainly a value add there. The more valuable you make the service, the more valuable then you make the device. And from the other side, of course, anyone who I think is an advocate of standards-based systems would also say that being able to access certain types of capabilities like that from multiple devices allows you to broaden your base [in order] to broaden the full range of customers then that you can offer those particular services to. So it really depends on your purpose. If you want to sell that device and to provide certain types of valuable services that help to sell that device, then that's a way to go.

Joseph Williams: So someone like a Boeing who wants to provide engineering or mechanical support might have a dedicated device that they're providing to Alaska Airlines mechanics or whatever as opposed to maybe in-app on an iPad or something. What you're saying is that they capture more of the value chain in that way.

I think that you're right. I think that's going to be really interesting because I think that there's a push toward trying to do everything on these generic Android, iPad, Windows platforms, or doing them in dedicated formats. How do you think that the video camera plays in all of this? I'll just tell you a quick experience that I have. Some of the guys on the call know that I'm a drone pilot. One of my drones broke. I initiated a customer support call over my mobile device, which was an iPad. They said, "show me what you're talking about," and I was able to just use the camera to show them exactly what went wrong with the drone. It was outstanding. Within 20 minutes, I had the whole thing fixed. And so, how important will the video side of this end up being?

Gina Clarkin: Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Truthfully, I started in contact centers in technical support. I built a knowledge base. It included all of these photos and graphical drawings of the equipment that we supported because we needed to know exactly what was plugged into each port for various models in order to provide the best support. The pictures really helped to convey the information to our agents. They would never have been able to quickly grasp that information otherwise. So, there's no question that video is really helpful in certain types of interactions. So support, as you're describing exactly where I can show you that picture. In insurance, where I can show you the damage to the car as we're discussing what my compensation should be, say, for that notice of loss, that auto accident.

And, no question also in the medical field where perhaps I'm working with a patient population and we have a disease-management program say for people who have certain types of chronic diseases, where a nurse contact center can reach out to them on a regular basis and see them and see how they healthy they look. And, do they look like they're taking their medication? What is the environment like? Does it look like they need to get someone out for a home visit because perhaps things are looking very dirty and cluttered and disorganized in a way that might indicate that there's something wrong with the patient? So there are certain types of applications where I think that video is extremely strong.

Marty Parker: Okay thanks.

Michael Finneran: Good point and worth a thousand words.

Don Van Doren: Gina and Rachel, one thing that occurs to me is that there are some really interesting opportunities that Interactive Intelligence brings to the field because of the different capabilities that you have built into your platform. So for example, the Mobilizer coupled with some of your IPA functionality. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, and about some of the ways that that could really start playing out to bring some very new capabilities into the field.

Rachel Wentink: Well, there's no question that access to work, essentially to a business process while someone is mobile, is critical, whether it's a customer performing an action that's then going to kick off a business process. Maybe it's sending in information related to a mortgage application that they've made for instance that's going to enable them to move that process along more quickly than if they have to wait until they can get home and scan in whatever that paperwork is, and then email it or something else from that home computer.

The other aspect of that is to be able to perform internal work with internal mobile apps. This is a big area of development now. I was just commenting to Gina that I had stumbled across a blog today that talks about the importance of mobile apps within the business and how it can transform all of your business processes. The fact that so many of us now, are not just working at our desks, and we still need to be able to access our work when we're moving around whether it's within a facility, whether it's visiting our customers, or performing other types of actions that take us away from the office. That ability to tie in a mobile app, and then to be able perform those tasks, really helps people stay productive and connected even when they're not directly in their office.

Don Van Doren: Well, that's great! Thanks. Okay, back to you Michael.

Michael Finneran: Roberta. I understand that you have a view on this. What would you like to add?

Roberta J. Fox: Thanks a lot, Michael. It's great to hear the comments from my fellow UC experts. To add to what Don talked about mobily enabling existing and what Bill said as well related to mobility in the contact center. I think that what's interesting and the folks from Interactive covered it in some of their comments. As a person who is probably 90% of the time mobile in running Fox Group across engagements in Canada and the U.S., what I would like to see, and I know my business clients with whom we're working are looking for, is using much more voice recognition and to be able to talk from our mobile devices to the contact center applications to be able to navigate through, whether that's a business form, or whether that's an auto attendant. Because one of the challenges, if we're talking on our mobile device, and we haven't got a headset, and not using hands free, it's really hard to actually push buttons, so being able to have the application to recognize our voice and to navigate through would be very important. I think that what really also enabled the B-to-B and the business to employee, that Michael was talking about.

So I think that what's going to drive the mobility enabling of contact centers is the two trends that we see from our work at Fox Group. I think it's really that the Baby Boomers who haven't used computers, but now are using Smartphones, want to use those as much as possible. And then as Rachel covered it, the N-gens that only use SMS and newer types of technology.

And I guess, the last thing that I think in this whole trend of mobility and of contact centers is to add the web, add the web conferencing desktop conferencing across the mobile devices.

So I think that's going to be coming up much sooner and faster. And I totally agree with Bill's conversion numbers. I think that it's going to be really important for Legacy contact centers to add these capabilities to maintain their revenue and also to grow their client base with the different profiles of customers wanting to use mobility, so back to you Michael.

Michael Finneran: Thank you. Well, this has been an interesting conversation. I'd like to thank my UCStrategies experts but to particularly thank Gina Clarkin and Rachel Wentink from Interactive Intelligence for both their contributions and for their insight. I think that this has been a valuable conversation, and we'll see you now in two weeks because next week most of us are going to be off to the UC Summit, but good day all, and thanks again.