We have heard and seen the rise in adoption of mobile in almost every area of our economy, and ecommerce is no exception. We even discussed in one of our articles, how ecommerce companies are using mobile customer support.
To understand better what this rise of mobile customer support means for online businesses, we set up a Q&A with Craig Borowski, the market researcher in the help desk recommendations business, Software Advice, about what their recent research on “Improve the Customer Experience Through Better Mobile Support IndustryView | 2015” uncovered.
TM: So you just released a new report on mobile customer support, what were some of the findings?
Craig: We’ve known that consumers are using mobile phones in customer service and help desk contexts, but we didn’t know how many or how often. This survey revealed that nearly two-thirds (63%) of U.S. adults use their mobile phones to seek customer support several times a month. This is the biggest, most eye-opening finding of this report!
It emphasizes that companies need to address this channel as soon as possible, or their customers may find a competitor who does.
TM: Out of these two-third adults, are there certain segments of people that seems to use mobile more often than others?
Craig: There are! The demographic variable with the strongest correlation to mobile usage is age.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, ages 18-24 years use mobile devices at a higher rate than other age groups. We found that 35-44 years of age group is a trailing close second to it.
It’s important to emphasize that while there are some differences in mobile usage between demographics, it’s the overall usage across all demographics, that’s the most significant finding.
A majority of people in the U.S. use their mobile devices to seek customer support. So it’s not just a small subset of the population, like only millennials or only early tech adopters. It’s practically everyone!
TM: What, according to you, Craig, are the implications of this revelation for ecommerce?
We talked to a few businesses that take a “mobile first” approach to their online strategy. This means that they begin by optimizing all their online resources to work well on mobile devices. This is the opposite of the more traditional approach where companies create their online resources with desktop users in mind, and only add mobile compatibility as an afterthought.
Mobile is now too popular and too widespread to be an afterthought. Smart companies are making it a priority.
TM: What do you feel are some necessary steps ecommerce must take to ensure a quality mobile customer care?
Craig: Great question! Our survey found a few recurring challenges customers encounter when trying to get customer care on a mobile device.
The first is the navigational difficulty – This includes websites that are poorly designed and those that don’t display correctly on smaller mobile screens. This problem can be avoided by using a mobile-first strategy which could include the use of responsive website design.
The Search is the second most common challenge which happens when customers use company’s website’s internal search to look for an answer, but the search tool returns irrelevant results. It can be very inconvenient to sort through lots of results on a mobile device, so many consumers just give up.
This problem is a little trickier to fix. It often requires a company to reappraise its online database of articles, FAQs and support documents. By understanding which resources get used most often— by which customers— and which have the best success rate— for which types of problems— companies can begin to offer more focused search results.
TM: And we very well understand how annoying a slow loading website can be at times. Anyway, where do you see mobile support going from here? What are the next big developments?
Craig: I expect we will see continued refinement of self-service and help desk resources and tools as described above. Companies have a huge incentive to improve these channels because customers prefer them (to all other service channels) and they can reduce the costs of providing service. It’s really a win-win situation.
We’ll also see better mobile compatibility for other channels. Live chat, for example, is a hugely popular support channel, but existing chat platforms don’t always work well on mobile devices. That will likely change in the very near future.
Finally, I expect to see more customization of mobile support to individual customers. This, I think, is where a lot of the untapped value of an online support channel will be found.
When a customer visits a company’s website, it’s possible, with the right tools, to know all about that customer’s previous purchases and service questions. Using this knowledge to automatically tailor the support resources to that individual customer would provide the ultimate support experience. The technology for this already exists and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes more common.
The big question that the finding of this research poses is – “Can ecommerce still afford to ignore the changing consumer behavior?”
The research has re-emphasized how mobile is the channel to focus for businesses online. As customers expect a seamless journey across all channels, eCommerce companies need to roll out their game plan and ensure a better mobile customer support. Delaying this adoption would do your competitors more good than it would to you.
Ask yourself: Can I risk this loss?
[This article is written by Team at TargetingMantra]
