NICE (NASDAQ: NICE), today introduced the NICE Mobile Reach (MR) solution, the industry's only comprehensive offering for assisted customer service over smartphones and tablets, which will change how customers use smart mobile devices for interacting with companies. NICE Mobile Reach allows enterprises to help mobile customers choose the best channel for completing their transaction, enables a seamless and effective transition with context to other channels when necessary, and facilitates multimedia communication between customers and agents during interactions. This offering will create a differentiated customer experience, helping to achieve greater loyalty, higher revenue and lower service costs.

The proliferation of smartphones and tablets is accelerating, and they are quickly becoming the preferred communication device for many consumers.  However, when communicating with companies' service centers, the smartphone is essentially a "dumb phone," used for just dialing a toll-free number, not utilizing its powerful capabilities and missing the opportunity for a rich and effective experience.

With the advent of new technologies like mobile devices and sms communications, banks are finding themselves back ‘out there’ having to figure out new platforms of interaction with their customers.  While it’s a bit destabilizing for these conservative organizations, it has help to create a realignment within their customer facing operations — one which was not being generated from within their organizations.

The concept of consumerization, which can be loosely defined as consumer technologies causing changes within businesses, has forced banks to align themselves around some key principles of customer experience in the mobile internet era.  Katherine Burger discusses these in her piece in a banking industry focused publication.

But we wonder whether these ‘standards’ can now apply to a wider range of industries beyond just banking.   With that in mind we thought it would be useful to ask companies which we are involved with to self assess on these standards within their own businesses.  We adapted the points into 4 quick questions which are worth asking:

1. Does your business have an ‘always on’ component (likely online)?
2. Would customers describe their experience with your products as easy?
3. Is there an adequate degree of integration of your solutions within the customer’s larger related experience
4. Do your customers experience a degree of personalization of their experience to their specific demographic, situation or needs?

It’s the age old debate between quality and quantity — only it’s focused towards the new medium of social networks.   A recent study by StickyEyes focused on measuring the balance between volume of social media activity and degree of engagement of target audiences.

The results of the study highlighted that the most active social media players in the retail space were generating impact but were not necessarily winning the engagement game.  

For us the key takeaway here is that companies need to be clear about their ultimate goals on social media and then adapt their efforts to ensure they are meeting them.  Social programs, like other marketing efforts, is full of ‘false achievements’ which allow companies to fool themselves into thinking they’ve achieved a lot in their social efforts.

The findings about top UK retailers brings home the point that many companies are not clear about exactly where they’re aiming — and ultimately affects the ROI of social programs.

Fresh off new partnerships with FOX and Oxygen, the second screen platform ACTV8.me is rolling out a loyalty program aimed at rewarding TV viewers. Powered by Tango Card, a virtual currency that can be redeemed for gift cards, ACTV8 says it will provide “real rewards” to encourage TV viewers to watch shows and engage with the app during the broadcast — and the commercial breaks. Rewards span Amazon, Fandango, The Gap, Target, Nike, Starbucks and more.

ACTV8′s push into rewards follows the rise of Viggle, a loyalty app that rewards viewers for checking into shows and participating on their second screens. Viggle has reported high engagement levels, and likewise ACTV8 says its average app user is interacting “10 times per episode and accepting over 2 offers per show episode.” ACTV8 says it has tested marketing campaigns with Walgreens, General Motors and Kraft.

Once companies get past the initial checkmark of implementing a VOC program, the focus naturally turns to the tactical enhancements that help drive response rates and sampling accuracy.  In the end, both these goals drive towards the larger goal of actionability of VOC data.

iPerceptions brings a two pronged, next level approach to improving both rate and balance of feedback responses.  Their approach is highly tactical:

Active feedback invitations
The switch from passive feedback forms or buttons on the website to randomly delivered active invitations that have some customization creates more engagement and by extension higher response rates.

Randomized Invitations
Avoiding the trap of segment skewed behaviour, the iPerceptions solution uses a random delivery methodology to ensure a more balanced sampling of the overall user base.

Their client, DAA, was able to immediately extract more actionable feedback data — in particular identifying specific segments which were being ‘underserved’ by the website.