It’s a multichannel, mobile world!

Knowing the customer is equally important. “You have to know the customer, to the best extent possible, their demographics, the most common journeys as well as those that have the greatest economic value,” Subramaniam says. “It is also important to have someone in the company orchestrating these interactions, such as a customer experience officer or someone responsible for digital transformation.”

The social channel is well recognized as a potential flashpoint for businesses. “The social megaphone is causing businesses to pay a lot more attention to this channel,” Subramaniam continues. “If they are not prepared to respond in some way to complaints or problems, the effect can snowball.” But the biggest pitfall in managing the multichannel environment is still siloed data. “Companies put in a social-focused product or a mobile-focused product, when they really need to look at the whole picture,” he says.

Social focus

As social media expanded as a channel, so did the requirements for managing the content derived from it. “Social was being run from marketing, and the customer service component was being ignored,” says Joshua March, founder and CEO of Conversocial. “We saw a significant opportunity for customer service.”

Conversocial was founded in 2010 to support enterprise social customer service. “We were an early partner of Facebook, developing custom applications, but wanted to establish a technology that would have a long-term impact,” March explains. “Our goal was to shift social media into the contact center so it would be fully integrated with other customer-related information.”

Hertz, a leader in auto rentals and sales, had a Facebook page and Twitter handle, but initially was not using those channels in its customer support. After discovering that 70 percent of the messages through Facebook and Twitter were from people seeking assistance, the company decided to move social media into its contact center.

Hertz deployed Conversocial, and now is able to use social media effectively for customer support. The company can gain a broader and more immediate overview of customer requirements for products and services, to answer questions more quickly and to benefit when customers share positive experiences via social media.

“Social media needs to be fully integrated into the fabric of businesses,” March says. “Conversocial has a full set of APIs that allow companies to surface social information through their CRM systems. Not all of them are doing it yet, but they are moving in that direction.” Once a company has a Facebook ID from a customer, it is possible to link that content with other enterprise content related to the customer for a full, integrated view.

Mobile dominates the Internet

Numerous research organizations have targeted 2014 as ?the crossover year when mobile devices become the leading technology for accessing the Internet, outpacing desktop computers for the first time. Early applications for mobile technology relied on browser access that was often cumbersome, but with the advent of apps over the past few years, the user interface improved dramatically. Thousands of apps are now available on mobile devices to support a wide range of functions in dozens of different industries.

Mobile capture

Banking and insurance are using mobile capture to scan in checks, input claim information and many other tasks. However, the mobile environment presents challenges that on-premise capture does not face. “In an office environment, the corners of the page can be positioned perfectly, the camera is always the same distance from the glass, and lighting is well controlled,” says Drew Hyatt, senior VP of mobile applications at Kofax.

“Once you start using mobile devices, the environment becomes much more variable,” he continues. “Kofax Mobile Capture Platform creates high-quality, legible images, compresses the file for easy transmission from mobile devices in real time and submits them directly into systems of record.”

Mobile learning

Lumi technology is designed for engagement and interaction during live training and other events. Lumi Say delivers surveys and tasks to users’ mobile devices, and Lumi Join provides live polls, quizzes, chat and other functions. Both products are also used for consumer market research.

“Lumi Say can leverage all the features of mobile devices,” says Zachary Konopka, director of enterprise business development at Lumi, “including the camera, video and text, to help the participant understand whatever initiative the organization is engaged in.”

Information collected on the mobile device can be pushed into a data warehouse via an API and analyzed using business intelligence (BI) tools. “In a training context, Lumi Say allows instructors to gather data prior to live training, formulate the training and measure the results on the spot,” Konopka adds.