Middle East enterprises can boost customer service through new kind of customer engagement

DUBAI, UAE: The rise of smart devices in the Middle East and a focus on customer loyalty has created the proverbial "perfect storm" for enterprises that want to reinvent the customer experience around smartphones and tablets.

Gartner research indicates that 39.7 million smartphones were sold in the Middle East and Africa last year, and this is expected to grow to 65 million units this year. Global smartphone sales stood at 676 million last year and tablets at 116 million.

Shaheen Haque, Territory manager, Middle East & Turkey at Interactive Intelligence says that these devices can help solve some of the challenges that have plagued the contact centre industry for more than 30 years. For example, caller identity, intent, and call context (what the customer tried immediately before calling) can be easily and passively established before a call begins. Caller expectations can be better managed, and enterprises can smooth the arrival rate of calls with intelligent, resource aware call-back.

Once calls are set up, interactions can be augmented with the use of data services in parallel to voice, for example by pushing content to a user's device. Mobile is a "hot initiative" in many organizations today, but the ability to translate momentum into the development of customer care capabilities varies widely based on organizational dynamics and the centre of gravity for mobile strategy within an enterprise.

Simply put, the biggest challenge to the rapid implementation of smart, connected interactions is for customer care teams to collaborate effectively with teams they may not have worked with in the past. The ownership of mobile strategy within an organization dictates the approaches that care teams must take to bringing mobile capabilities to market.