Customer interactions: shifting from the phone to the internet

The last couple of years with the explosive growth of smartphones and tablet PCs, we have entered a new Internet era. Through the first two decades of its existence, the web has been accessed primarily by classic computer devices (desktops/laptops). While laptops do offer a decent degree of portability, they still remain cumbersome to carry around everywhere. We are now witnessing a rapid change in internet consumption mediums, as capable small devices that can fit in our pockets or handbags offer access to the world of the web.

The convenience mobile access to the internet offers is too immense to be held back. Having every kind of information you could find on the web available with us any time at any place is definitely going to improve the efficiency of many of our activities. But retrieving information is probably the least of the benefits; the ability to add information as we come across it and the ability to communicate with others using multiple different types of media are probably the two biggest changes. Adding information to the internet has traditionally been a rather long procedure of gathering material, processing it and then uploading it. Now with mobile devices capable of connecting to the internet in a close to fully featured manner, everything can be added on the fly. And social media offer new ways to efficiently share everything with various circles.

As mobile internet rapidly becomes a habit for more and more people all over the world, certain behaviors and trends are bound to change. And one of the things that are already changing is the way customers interact with companies. Traditionally, people have used the telephone to contact companies and vice versa. The telephone became the medium of choice in the past for various reasons; it offers quick and accurate communication, it has a rather dense degree of interactivity (there is minimal delay between each question and answer) and mobile phones are small enough to be carried around everywhere. Smartphones and mobile internet can sustain all the advantages the telephone has and add a whole lot more.

Let’s take an example into consideration: we have a washing machine that happens to malfunction and we are calling the vendor to find out how to fix it. Using the phone, the vendor first level support technician could give some generic instructions on how to perform basic troubleshooting actions to try and isolate the problem at hand. This communication, while being quick and interactive is not very accurate, since the information the technician gets from us might not be good enough (since we do not possess the knowledge required to mention all the important issues). Using a video call instead or taking some pictures and streaming these to the technician could greatly increase the quality of information the technician has at their disposal. Furthermore, the technician could, in the same manner, send a video or a picture showing exactly how to perform an action that could solve the problem we have in a matter of few minutes. There are countless other examples that can be thought of, where UC would greatly enhance the efficiency of several activities.

Thus customers will eventually migrate from using the phone as a primary medium to communicate with everyone (including companies whose products/services they purchase) to using fully featured multimedia communication that technologies such as UC offer. And companies have to be ready for that change when this happens.

Of course this will not happen in a fortnight. It will take a long time until the majority of people start using extensively mobile devices to connect to the internet; smartphones are still too basic in terms of hardware to offer an experience equivalent to that of a desktop or laptop high resolution screen. And even those that are starting to come closer are still too expensive for the mainstream users, though this is bound to change within a handful of years. There is also a matter of habits that don’t change easily especially as older people have had those habits for too many years. As with every change of that scale – it will start small and gradually expand. There are users that will adopt mobile internet and multimedia as their primary communication method early on and others that might take many years to do the switch.