According to Forrester Research, one billion consumers will have smartphones by 2016. And U.S. consumers alone will own 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets by 2016. We live in an age of instant information and seamless connections. As a result, the modern digital consumer expects high-quality customer service across all interactions on the smartphone – including voice, email, texting and push notifications in smartphone apps.
The majority of companies are talking about their smartphone strategy – but what they really need is a multi-channel strategy that reaches mobile customers with a seamless, unified, and coordinated experience across all smartphone channels.
A few months ago, we announced Varolii Mobile Solutions to help companies enhance the smartphone experience. By making existing smartphone applications more relevant, useful and personalized, companies can more easily reach mobile consumers and engage them with the right information at the right time. We do this with smartphone push notifications and hosted Web applications that enhance your smartphone app to deliver information at the consumer’s fingertips. But, that’s just one piece of the puzzle.
For organizations with existing smartphone applications that want to enable for customer interactions, we are also introducing the Varolii Interact Mobile Service MC, the cloud-based API with the broadest set of channels available on the market to interaction enable your business applications. Varolii Interact Mobile Service MC enables developers to easily add customer interaction capabilities into existing smartphone applications with an option to create multi-channel interaction applications via push notifications, voice, text and email.
The Varolii Interact Mobile Service MC provides an easy way for companies to ‘interaction-enable’ their existing business applications with the broadest number of channels and reach consumers regardless of which channel they prefer. It does this with our Interact Xpress 10 multi-channel Application Programming Interface (API) and a free Mobile App Software Development Kit (SDK) to add push notifications to Apple and Android mobile applications.
This means that companies now have an easy-to-use option for multi-channel communications that can be leveraged quickly and is scalable to meet the changing volumes of communications needed through the customer lifecycle. And, developers are able to eliminate the complexity of integrating with multiple single-channel API vendors to interaction-enable their smartphone applications.
For example, in the utilities industry, it is hard to keep customers informed during and after a power outage. What if your customers primary contact number is their home phone? If the power is out, that phone may not work. With a multi-channel approach, a utilities company can initiate a phone call first and then, follow up with a text message if the consumer doesn’t respond. With proactive outreach like this, utilities can reduce the volume of incoming calls during an outage and reach more people quickly and consistently within a matter of minutes.
With this unified multi-channel approach, companies ensure they have an integrated strategy that can adapt to more effectively reach consumers across a wide array of channels on the smartphone. And, because it’s a cloud-based system, companies can dial up or down the volume as needed to reach all their customers at the right time.
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