Earlier this year, Kate Leggett from Forrester published her top ten predications for customer service in 2014. One of them was particularly interesting to me:

Trend 2: Customer Service Will Adopt a Mobile-First Mindset

Customer service mobile applications remain nascent as more companies focus on their mobile marketing, sales and ecommerce mobility strategies. In 2014, companies will look to aligning mobile strategies, technology investments and user experiences across functional groups like marketing, customer service, ecommerce and IT. More companies will move away from duplicating their web presence for their mobile offering, and will focus on deploying the right usage scenarios that add value to customers in a mobile environment, with focused user experiences that allow tasks to be efficiently accomplished.

Since Forrester published this we have seen the acquisition of mobile messaging service Whatsapp by Facebook. The value of the deal – around £11.4bn – shows how much value is now placed on mobile services.

And tools like Whatsapp have been mobile since day one. You don’t need an email address or a computer to sign up for Whatsapp, you just connect using your phone. It’s always been a mobile-oriented service.

And as more widely used services go mobile-only we will find that the industry needs to think in more detail about what Forrester suggests – how customer service needs to be different to support services that are mobile-only.

What are the differences you expect to find between a service used on a laptop and a phone? Leave a comment here on the blog or just tweet me on @matt_sims1.

Photo by Ron Aldaman licensed under Creative Commons