Customer Care for the Mobile-First Consumer

Let’s be honest: our daily lives involve a lot of this.

So why when we need to contact customer support should we have to do this?

We’re living in a mobile-first society. For the majority of brands, it’s in your best interest to cater to the mobile customer. Below are a few essential steps you can take to ensure you’re providing a mobile-friendly customer experience.

Design a Mobile-Friendly Website

By now, this should be a no-brainer, but it’s one of the most important things you can do. If your support portal is hosted or designed separately from your main site, ensure that it’s easy to navigate via mobile as well.

Make sure to try it out for yourself or contract some QA testers to do a thorough pass. Do your customers have to pinch and zoom to read important text? Do essential buttons like “Submit” or “Contact Us” get lost off the side of the page on certain size displays? Is it responsive to all phone displays or just the most recent models?

If you offer phone support, make your contact number an easy click-to-call button. Don’t display your phone number as part of an image or as text, forcing customers to bounce back and forth between their browser and call app to manually enter.

Respond on Social Media

The vast majority of social media usage is via mobile devices. In addition to sharing their own content and connecting with others, people actively use social media to reach out to brands with questions and feedback, and they expect a response (a quick one, at that). Unfortunately, most of these messages go ignored; let’s not feed that statistic.

If you have a social media presence, don’t just post content and call it a day. Have someone (or multiple someones, depending on volume) who monitors your social media channels to respond to comments, tweets, messages, and reviews. Positive customer experiences on social media have been proven to contribute to greater brand loyalty, and who doesn’t want that?

Offer Text/SMS Support

When you need a quick response from a friend, do you email them or text them? Exactly. So why should customer support be any different? Familiar and convenient, text support is like a live chat, but without the need to stay connected the entire time.

In 2017, the world sent approximately 16 million text messages. Per. Minute. It’s safe to say texting has become most people’s primary form of communication. As with social media, leverage the platforms your customers are already comfortable with to provide them the most convenient support possible. Don’t worry, your agents won’t have to use mobile; there are several tools that allow them to manage text messages from a computer. Just keep in mind that customers will likely expect quick responses and around-the-clock availability.

Respond Quickly

The average response time for a text message is just 90 seconds, and even that can feel too long when you’re waiting for an important reply. Compare that to the average response time for a customer support e-mail (around 12 hours), and it’s easy to see why consumer expectations may seem more demanding in a mobile-first world.

Whether you’re just considering the mobile-first customer or honing your current support strategy to better serve them, consider both short- and long-term goals. Some website adjustments will take longer to roll out, while things like a click-to-call button can be quick to implement. If you don’t have the bandwidth to add full-time staff to support your social channels or offer text support, consider outsourcing to a team of experienced agents who’ve done both for a range of businesses. It’s a worthwhile investment; the payoff will be in the smiles on your customers’ faces when they eventually look up from their devices.