Contributing to the Ongoing Development Process

Mobile apps provide a different shopping experience from a company’s website. Whether it’s a better experience or not depends on the quality of the app, including its design, stability, and how easy the app makes it for shoppers to find and buy the products they want. Support for customers using the app is also an aspect of the overall experience. A call center that knows the app well and can replicate the customer experience when solving problems will do a better job of providing support and delivering a positive experience.

Beyond supporting customers, a call center like Global Response that provides clients with constant and structured feedback on the customer experience can help a company with the ongoing process of refining and upgrading its mobile app. Even when you’re creating your app, your call center can help you get feedback before you make it generally available so you can fix bugs and shortcomings before you publish it. Customers tell call center representatives like ours what they like and don’t like, when it crashes, when a shipping number doesn’t show up, when a source code box won’t accept a six-digit number and so on. We pass that information on to you so you can fix problems early in the development process.

This feedback loop with your call center can help you avoid bad reviews on social media sites, get your app off the right foot, notify you rapidly when there’s an issue, and improve your customers’ mobile shopping experience.

With smart phones and tablets at the top of so many holiday wish lists, the growth in mobile shopping will only accelerate in 2012. In fact, the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com, has even priced their new Kindle Fire tablet device at or near the break-even point in an effort to get consumers conditioned to walking around with their own personal Amazon ordering device.

Customer Support for Mobile Apps and More

As your partner in delivering a great customer experience, your call center needs to be ready and able to provide high-quality, high-touch support for your mobile shoppers. If you don’t already have a strategy for making that possible, here are some pointers on getting started.

• Provide your call center representatives with mobile devices—smart phones and tablets—running your company’s application. This ensures they can replicate your customers’ experience and deliver superior support.
• Research, implement and manage a platform for mobile emulation (device emulator, browser emulator, or operating system emulator) so that agents can, on their desktop, duplicate the customer’s experience and see exactly what the customer is seeing so they can provide clear, accurate support.
• Work with your call center managers to develop an overarching strategy for mobile support. Identify and monitor mobile-related customer support issues, read reviews of your app, communicate with developers to quickly address issues with the app, publicize updates that fix problems, etc.

Supporting Mobile to Build Your Brand

An effective support program for mobile shoppers has all the benefits of your existing support program for online and call-in shoppers. It can increase sales, take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities, explain and clarify policies, and be a tremendous help in the overarching goals of building your brand and your business.

Do you already have a mobile strategy in place at your call center? How is it helping you deliver support to customers who are using this increasingly important channel?

• Get a trial or demo of a social media monitoring service, like Radian6, NetBase, socialmention, HootSuite, or any of a couple of dozen other choices. (Here’s just one handy list of tools.)
• Use the monitoring tool to gather two weeks of data about the conversation regarding your brand in social media.
• Take the data to your call center manager (in-house or outsourced) and devise a strategy for integrating social media monitoring into the call center workflow. Discuss what role the call center can play, what the volume of online buzz is, how many representatives will be assigned to monitor and/or respond to posts, how many hours will be allotted to the activity, and so on.
• Decide how the customer support function for social media will work with your marketing department or agency as it implements a social media marketing strategy. Will there be a protocol for handing off issues from one to the other? Is that necessary? How will marketing communicate about promotional campaigns or other activities that may affect customer service?
• As you continue using the tool to monitor the online conversation about your brand, determine what social media metrics are useful to your business for understanding the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, the impact of new product releases, the reaction to changes in company policy, or any issue that affects your audience. Track those metrics and analyze them to understand what’s driving the trends you see.

We already help our clients with this process and would be glad to discuss it with you.

We’d also like to hear from you: What are your experiences in getting started with using social media for customer support? Any do’s or don’ts to pass on to other businesses just starting down this road?

Two-thirds of the world’s internet users are now on social media, and they’re talking about your brand. Listening to what they’re saying is important, but it’s even more important to join the conversation. By responding to tweets, Facebook posts, blog musings, and forum threads, you can address small issues before they become big, help customers resolve problems, correct misperceptions, and polish your brand image. Taken together, those actions help you attract and retain customers and boost your bottom line.

The Value of Professional Customer Service

So where do you start? You can invest in a social media monitoring service or you can license monitoring software. That’s how you stay on top of what consumers are saying about your brand, your competition and your industry. Some services also provide tools for measuring positive and negative sentiment and engaging with consumers. All that is useful. But be careful about “engaging”: It takes polished communications skills and a customer-service mindset to make and keep friends online. If people in your organization have the time and skill set to do that, and you want to invest in the service or software, you’re in great shape. If not, a call center that uses the listening tools and has representatives who are customer service experts can be a perfect partner.

Your call center might be a good fit for handling these customer service issues instead of an in-house marketing department or marketing agency. Global Response, for example, already helps clients listen to social media and respond promptly and professionally to customer support issues. One of our clients, a leading retailer of fashion clothing, is a great example. We monitor the company’s Facebook page and Twitter account and respond on their behalf. To resolve issues, we respond online to posts or even call customers. For instance, a customer ordered an item only to be notified it was on back order. She published an online post expressing her disappointment. We called her, explained the reasons for the back order status to her satisfaction, and helped her shop for another, similar product on the retailer’s website. She ordered and received that comparable product and remains a satisfied customer of our client retailer.

Protecting Your Brand Image Online

Of course, the social media universe is a lot bigger than just Facebook and Twitter. Your customers are expressing opinions on group or fan pages on social media sites, forums devoted to a single topic, forums that aggregate content from other sites, blogs, microblogs, and more. We use state-of-the-art tools like Radian6 to find those opinions, but more importantly, we use Global Response brand care specialists to respond. They know how to talk to customers, how to fix issues, and how to speak your brand like you do.

One last key distinction: You may already be using your marketing department or a marketing agency to market your brand via social media. Smart move—to be competitive, it’s a channel you can’t ignore. But you can’t ignore the customer service part of the equation, and that’s the service we offer. We’re customer support experts, and we can work in tandem with your marketing team to help you meet social media goals. They proactively market your brand, we reactively care for it online just as you would by expressing your brand personality, solving problems, and keeping customers happy. To make the most of your opportunities in social media, you need both kinds of expertise.

Here’s more information about Social Media Support at Global Response.

Last year’s show was a banner celebration, with more than 22,000 retail executives attending. Be sure come meet us this year at exhibit #464.

Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.), Version 8 comes with powerful features that enable merchants to ensure order authenticity, connect to virtually any ecommerce shopping cart or 3rd party system, protect your bottom line from fraud, customize the system to your unique needs, and open new sales channels to accelerate revenue growth.

New features integrated into M.O.M. Version 8 include:

• Powerful APIs to interface with any ecommerce system and import orders as well as handle point-of-purchase or telephone orders, order workflow automation, inventory and customer information
• Fraud protection to identify and carve-out suspicious transactions so you can protect your bottom line by catching fraudulent orders before they ship
• A built-in connection to Amazon Marketplace that meets the company’s 2012 requirements and gives you the ability to reach their 130 million customers
• Customizable invoices and the option to use paperless invoicing
• Enhanced General Ledger exports for accounting systems

Through M.O.M. Version 8′s powerful API, Global Response can now interface with any eCommerce system, including our proprietary OrderNet system,  and import orders as well as handle telephone orders, order workflow automation, inventory and customer information, freeing internal resources and expediting accurate order fulfillment. “The API will allow us to interface our Ordernet and/or any other ecommerce web sites with MOM as a back end,” says Michael Shooster, Co-COO of Global Response.  ”This could also reduce our requirement for licenses as agents could work with pretty much any web site and back end into MOM at the warehouse, or a client’s MOM back-end solution.”

For more on Global Response’s order management system (OMS) and platform integration, call 800-537-8000 and speak with a Specialist.