In a recent interview with media platform Fast Company, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said: "I think the smartphone itself as a window to the Internet, and as a window to people's digital life, has a lot of legs and a lot of innovation left."
It's no surprise that the smartphone has revolutionised the way we communicate. An interesting phenomenon is how it has allowed and changed employees' way of working and engaging with one another.
Interaction between employee and the business via a smartphone has many attractive attributes for both parties if managed correctly, and the platform should be viewed as a tool that is as beneficial to employee and customer engagement - this is also true for agents in a contact centre.
As smartphones have proliferated, users have embraced their dynamic nature, incrementally changing their own lives around the phone's ability to let them interact and communicate in new ways, says Evan Dobkin, cloud contact centre expert at Ocular Technologies' partner company, Aspect. "And, because of how deeply smartphones integrated into lives, the enterprise had to adapt to a device that now existed alongside employees, but did not come from an enterprise initiative. This resulted in technology leaders such as CIOs and IT departments who didn't readily embrace bring your own device or develop user-centric apps," he adds.
He notes that what they did create in the contact centre were portal apps, which were either developed by a third party or in-house to facilitate day-to-day agent scheduling. "These efforts were weak, and usually cumbersome.
"So while it may seem like a simple thing to request a specific schedule, a call out for that day or trade schedules with another employee, doing so in a proprietary native application (or often a very slow mobile Web page) wasn't always so simple."
Applications need to be updated; they change from version to version and are often built from a designer's perspective, and they may not have any insight into how a call centre agent would use them, says Dobkin.
"The effect that we've seen since is that a smart business will look to see if the next iteration of a particular process can be improved by using the dynamic, user-centric concepts which make smartphone apps so enjoyable. It makes the most sense to offer agents the ability to perform these tasks with the least amount of steps and via interaction methods they're already accustomed to," says Dobkin.
As company's start to get to grips with the growing chatbots space it make sense to give agents the same tools as the customer, allowing a faster evolvement in meeting the needs of consumers - internally and externally.
Employees should be treated the same as customers, making it easier to conceive how tools can be improved to better support self-service, bringing about smoother on-boarding, and identifying "that the most important facet is facilitating goals, which can be varied or even outside of what we would normally think a product is used for," says Dobkin.
"This is part of a larger shift that companies must add to their mix of changes as they evaluate how to evolve to meet the needs of the modern consumer, both inside and outside of their organisation."
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