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Having one of the most stalwart smartphone user bases in the world, the Middle Eastern businesses are all set to ramp up their online services by enhancing customer experience through deployment of mobile self-service applications. With the number of mobile subscribers over 195 million, there is a huge potential for apps in the Middle East. On one hand, this approach would expedite communication with customers while strengthening relationships with them, and on the other hand, consumers would also experience a sense of convenience.

According to reports, the mobile app market is already expected to exceed $66bn in four years, which is twice as much as $31bn total of 2011. However, not all organizations are finding it easy to put these tools to their advantage. In order to realize the full potential of these mobile apps, businesses need to fully focus on customers’ needs. Apps can enhance the customer experience by making use of smartphones’ advanced features and tablets i.e. the touch screen, display and selection techniques and location intelligence etc.

Why to Integrate Apps in Customer Services

According to the Territory Manager at Interactive Intelligence, Middle East & Turkey, Mr. Shaheen Haque, “for contact centers the key to excelling at customer service is to integrate all customer touch points”. Although the contact center industry has been topping off all service techniques for decades yet mobile revolution presents a new ground to begin with. As people are increasingly developing greater affinity for mobile devices, it has become even more essential to integrate mobile experience with customer support plans.

To provide relationship-enhancing customer service, the industry needs to work on app interfaces with the contact center. When a user encounters some glitch while using the app, the app should be able to automatically interact with the contact center. Apart from placing a call, the entire account of the customer’s session on the app should be forwarded to the contact center. The contact center the can put the customer in a virtual queue while notifying him of the time an agent will call him. This way the contact center agents would already know what the customer might be calling about, so there is no need to waste time by indulging in a lengthy query and response session to categorize the call and with the history of session available, the problem can be analyzed without even having the customer on the line.

What Good It Is

A study conducted by Ventana Research on behalf of Interactive Intelligence reveals that the original purpose of self-service systems is to stop the calls to customer service personnel. This goal can be realized by deploying apps that are user oriented and advance use of companies’ information and systems. The contact centers can also improve several KPIs with these apps, such as FCR and interaction handling time.

The extensive use of mobile and social media means even better services experience for the customers. Therefore, in order to cater to the needs of todays’ mobile customers, companies should deploy a mobile platform which could allow them to constantly improve customer service capabilities and eventually translate into stronger customer bonds.