Including Smartphone End User Apps in the Context of the Company Contact Center

Abstract: Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, with the result that customers prefer to carry out at least some customer services using an app on a mobile device. Among app users, smooth transfer to a live agent is seen as an important feature and this means that the company contact center need a solution to handle this as well as increasing numbers of interactions. The question this thesis tries to answer is "how can smartphone end user apps be included in the context of the company contact center"? To answer this question research was conducted regarding the possibilities of an Android smartphone, with the results of this research being used to define a use case, a state flow diagram and create a demonstration app. The thesis showed that it is possible to have an app as an online channel for customer service interactions. New possibilities in comparison to traditional telephony include that customer data such as topic, authentication, location and multimedia can be sent to the contact center before an actual interaction is started.