Smart devices and social media to drive new culture of online, always-connected customers in 2013

AUSTRALIA: New analytics solutions, multichannel metrics, and better collaboration tools will be crucial in 2013, as enterprises feel the pressure to understand and pre-empt the needs from the always-connected customer, says Ovum. Vendors will need to step up and add these capabilities fast, or else risk losing business.

As part of its 2013 Trends to Watch series, Ovum explores the important changes in the customer experience and interaction market, detailing how technologies are evolving to meet new consumer demands and providing recommendations for both enterprises and vendors.

According to Ovum’s report, social media response teams will move into the contact center, driving the need for better social media management tools, and the global analyst firm forecasts high growth (21 percent CAGR) for social media monitoring within the customer service function in the next five years. Mobile self-service will become more intelligent, customers will have the ability to request a callback from within a mobile application, and it will become easier to transfer a query from a self-service application to voice, chat, or email.

Traditionally siloed applications such as performance management, business intelligence, and customer feedback will be merged into voice-of-the-customer (VOC) analytics suites that help enterprises view and compare data across different stages of the customer lifecycle. Many enterprises will have a mixture of cloud- and premise-based customer service solutions, although, for most companies, core automated call distribution (ACD) functionality is likely to remain on-premise for the foreseeable future because of existing investments and mentality.

“Enterprises need to support today’s customers by providing timely and accurate responses via mobile, web, and voice channels. In order to succeed, they must address customer needs at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and support and integrate data internally. It makes sense for enterprises to create collaborative customer experience teams in order to align technology and data strategies across product, IT, marketing, and customer support,” says Aphrodite Brinsmead, senior analyst at Ovum.