Hipmob aims to be the premier in-app customer service tool
It seems like just a couple days ago I was at the Pulse talk on how they built their front end and back end news delivery service, where I met this lovely lady who told me about machine-learning customer service. The idea at the time was pretty interesting as I know some companys have yet to even implement human driven customer service chat features on websites.
Sure the feature is quite common on the Web. But how about for Apps? Well, Hipmob is making an effort to become “the premier support service for mobile”
Co-founder Ayo omojola noted that, there are plenty of tools like Olark and Zendesk for providing similar services on the web, but the mobile market remains underserved. Sure it may be a little early, after-all, how many times do you actually want to talk with a CSR while you’re playing a game, or chatting with your friend via a social networking app? Probably not that much. But according to Omojola,
“a tool like hipmob works especially well in situations when a vendor is selling a product that gets consumed offline.”
An example given in an interview w ith TechCrunch was:
A taxi app in Mexico and a number of online ecommerce companies. In these situations, talking to a customer as quickly as possible matters.
Hipmob is said to work with virtually every XMPP-compatible chat client and the company is also working on building its own chat service. Additionally, it integrates with Salesforce.com, Desk.com and Highrise, also Campfire and HipChat. After every conversation on the service, the tool automatically uploads a transcript to any of these CRM tools. Integrating the service into a mobile app, Omojola said, should take an experienced developer less than an hour and the overhead is under 350 KB.
On the Users end, the service mimics the native chat clients on iOS and Android. To get started, users simply click the ‘chat’ button in the app and get started. A feature the team built into the service is the ability to pick up chats outside of the app by using push notifications. This should come especially handy when the app crashes, for example, or when vendors want to contact a user after the original chat is over. Hipmob also offers the ability to send audio messages and images to document a problem.
Prices start at $25 per agent and 500 chats per month, but without the CRM integration.
Kevin is an Online and Mobile Marketing Strategist who has worked with companies of all sizes over the last 6 years. You can follow Kevin on any of the social platforms below.
