Putting Humanity into Your Company's Mobile App

Today's customers expect their offline and online experiences with a business to sync up, but in all too many cases they don't. To help meet this challenge, one thing companies will soon begin doing is upgrading their mobile apps so that they can handle real-time, human-to-human customer interactions. No extra call or computer session required.

Imagine the world three or four years from now, when your customer will be able to use your company’s mobile app to browse for advice about something related to your offer. If she doesn’t find the answer to her question, she’ll be able to push a button to connect with one of your own live agents (by voice or chat), who will see her history on the web site and won’t require her to repeat everything. When necessary, your agent may even be able to push a diagram of the correct way to operate your product, or a chart of other options available, directly to her smartphone, and all within the same app – your app.

If you want to visualize the kind of service this could soon offer to customers, take a look at Amazon’s Mayday button for its Kindle Fire. The principle is the same, even though Mayday is a separate function on Amazon's own tablet device, and not directly embedded within a smartphone app.

But other companies are now starting to integrate a human connection directly into their smartphone apps without requiring a specific device.

In December, Weight Watchers introduced 24/7 Expert Chat, a new feature that allows premium Weight Watchers subscribers to access a live Coach anytime, anywhere, for any reason via mobile chat within the Weight Watchers app. Subscribers can get instant advice on how to get started, get back on track, and stay motivated – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – from a Weight Watchers-certified Coach who was once in their shoes and has successfully lost weight. The company has some 16,000 service providers in the field, a significant advantage over its competitors, and Weight Watchers has now trained nearly 4,000 of those to leverage them even further with its mobile app.

The company has deep-linked this human connection into its mobile app by relying on technology from a start-up named “Humanify,” recently spun off from TeleTech. Apps have always been able to “deep link” with other apps. This is why, as John Battelle says in his Searchblog post, you get an ad served to you in the middle of your maps function for, say, a nearby restaurant. Battelle says that up to now deep linking has been primarily driven by the commercial incentive to do more cross-selling and lead generation, but he predicts a dramatic change – a “turning point” – coming soon.

And deep linking to provide genuine, human-to-human service is what Humanify specializes in. Chat is one function you can use to connect with your customers (like Weight Watchers is doing), but its technology also offers direct voice connections, as well, still within the mobile app. The company’s software won’t be sold as a consumer app itself. Instead, it will sell to individual brands, so each will be able to “humanify” their own mobile app by deep linking human-based customer care and sales functions directly into the app itself, however they choose to do so.

Humanify’s technology also includes a feedback-based, continuously improving knowledgebase, designed to super-charge a client’s self-service options, as well as improving the matching engine that is used to link particular users with particular coaches, agents, or other representatives of a brand. Weight Watchers is just one of the start-up’s first clients.

This is the frictionless future of the connected customer experience, so watch for the stampede as other brands begin to reach for this kind of drastic improvement in the capabilities of their commercial apps.

Full disclosure: TeleTech is the parent company of Peppers & Rogers Group.