New mobile customer service solution launched

Interactive Intelligence is releasing a new software platform that enables organisations to rapidly deploy customer service applications on multiple mobile operating systems, devices and social media websites, while bridging the gap between mobile self-service and live assistance.

The new mobile customer service solution, Interaction Mobilizer, is designed to change the way customers using mobile devices interact with businesses, according to Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald E. Brown.

“With more than 100 million smartphone users in the U.S. and about 19% owning tablets, customers are demanding more efficient ways to use their mobile devices for business transactions,” Brown said. “We developed Interaction Mobilizer to do just that: empower companies to more quickly deploy transactional mobile apps that give customers a unified customer service experience.”

Interaction Mobilizer offers the following features:

• Enables organisations to offer powerful self-service applications to customers using iPhones, Android phones, and Windows phones, as well as the organisation’s Facebook site.
• Makes development and deployment of mobile applications easy by specifying them in a device-independent, high-level language that can be pushed out to all supported mobile devices and social media sites.
• Enables the customer to request a call-back from a service representative and be updated periodically as to when the call-back will occur. Future versions will support chat, text messaging, and video.
• Provides a scalable architecture that can support any number of mobile customers and yet is easy for IT to manage.
• Integrates well with social media resources such as Facebook and Twitter, including using Facebook for user authentication.

Interaction Mobilizer enables organisations to brand their own mobile applications then publish them on the appropriate app store (e.g. Android, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.), or offer them from their corporate website for users to download.

Customers can log on using their Facebook ID, or using company-supplied credentials, as desired.

In support of providing a unified customer experience and bridging the gap between mobile self-service and live agent assistance, Interaction Mobilizer enables customers to  transition from a mobile self-service interaction to a Web callback, click-to-call, or text chat. Contextual information — such as the customer’s name, what device they were using, the forms or products they were reviewing, and even GPS coordinates — is transferred to the agent. These interactions can be queued and routed based on agent skill, and information is “popped” onto the agent’s computer screen when the customer is connected.

“Driven by the opportunity to lower costs and expand customer choice, an increasing number of companies are offering self-service applications via mobile devices,” said Richard Snow, vice president and research director at Ventana Research. “However, we estimate that nearly two-thirds of customers engaging in self-service end up requiring interaction with a contact center agent. As a result, successful mobile customer service solutions must seamlessly link the self-service experience with live assistance.”

In addition to providing features that result in a unified customer service experience, Interaction Mobilizer also provides integration to back-end corporate systems, as well the ability to access hosted data in the cloud from vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle/RightNow, salesforce.com, and others.