Customer Service Reimagined

Davy Kestens
Chief Executive Officer
Sparkcentral






When was the last time you looked at your phone? According to Moment, the average American picks up their phone 43 times in a day, and analytics firm Flurry says Americans spend nearly three hours per day on their mobile devices. People are obsessed with their phones and brands know that in order to reach customers they need to step up their mobile game. Most brands offer mobile apps but they are missing one key component. Can you guess what it is?



The (Incomplete) Promise of Mobile Apps

Brands quickly got on the mobile app bandwagon but forgot about mobilizing customer experience. Let’s use an example of a frequent experience. You are shopping in your favorite mobile app- scroll, click, add to cart. Alas, you click on your cart to buy your goods but unfortunately notice that the whole time your cart had not been updating. Help! Now you must reach out to customer service but that is easier said than done. You leave your cart, try to find that button with the three lines that someone decided means “menu”, click Contact Us and…oh. You are met with phone numbers for contact centers ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe, 28 different emails and an option to fax over your complaint. This may be just my opinion (doubt it) but we have passed the days of calling customer service to order items from a catalog received in the mail. Customers are mobile so shouldn’t customer service be mobile too?

There is an obvious pain in the customer service experience within mobile apps. The need to leave the mobile app to contact customer care is a massive disconnect and an irritatingly negative experience. From 2013-2014, mobile usage grew 76% and shows no signs of stopping. But how can brands turn contacting customer experience into a positive and easy experience? The answer is in mobile customer service.



Fitting Mobile Customer Service into the Contact Center

Sure there are in-app messaging solutions that exist today. But none of them have been specifically designed for the enterprise, until now. Our In-App Messaging solution has been weaved into Sparkcentral’s overall workflow that’s already deployed at many large organizations’ contact centers, such as United, Netflix, Uber, Discover and T-Mobile. Being able to message in-app means that when you have that question about your empty cart, you can click Contact Us and “text” your message to a customer care agent on the other side. An agent can respond to you in minutes which I think we can all agree is better than sitting on hold for 45 minutes until we are re-routed to another agent who may or may not be able to solve our problem.



In-App Messaging isn’t just for brands; it’s for customers too. Brands benefit by being able to scale their contact centers, perform at an accelerated rate and delight their customers, which means creating brand advocacy and lifelong customers. Customers on the other hand, continue frequenting your mobile app because of the additional value concierge-level personalized support brings. At Sparkcentral we believe great customer service makes everyone happy–I’m sure there’s a statistic on that somewhere– so, brands and customers alike, I’d like to introduce you to In-App Messaging.

Welcome to the future of Sparkcentral. The future of customer service.
 
About the author:
As founder and CEO of Sparkcentral, Davy is leading the customer service revolution. In 2012, immediately after founding the company, Davy moved from Belgium to San Francisco. He can get incredibly excited about Startups, enterprise software, and great food.