Upland Software EVP Visits “The Chat Bubble” to Talk Customer Experience

3 minute read

Upland Admin

While text messaging has been around for decades, there are still plenty of new things to be said about this communication channel. On @mssg’s podcast, The Chat Bubble, Michael Sabat sits down with industry experts to discuss news, views, and the latest best practices from the world of mobile messaging.

Last month, Michael spoke to Jed Alpert, Upland Software’s EVP and General Manager of Customer Experience Management (CXM), about the role of mobile messaging in great customer experiences.

As the founder of Mobile Commons, one of the industry’s first mobile messaging platforms, Jed is no stranger to the world of mobile messaging. From delivering text messages for Britney Spears to surviving errant adventures in taxi cabs, the podcast covers his long, innovative history in the industry.

Here are some selected highlights from the episode, edited for clarity:

What is customer experience management?

“It’s all about the customer experience – how the customer of [Upland’s] customer experiences communication. At its best, you have all the channels – primarily the digital channels – and you are organizing your communication flow with [the customer], meaning that you’re delivering something they want and value.

“We’ve come from a universe where a lot of these channels are siloed…but what gets really exciting is where you can take all of those channels and optimize it so the customer is getting something they really want and value on the right channel, at the right time. Knitting all of those things together – marketing automation, analytics and insight, and other kinds of data – allows you to organize those kinds of programs…to ensure the optimal outcome for both enterprise and customer.”

What does the future hold for customer experience?

“I think RCS is interesting and will be an important channel. There [are] so many factors to adoption that it’s hard to say when it will happen, but it will definitely happen. WhatsApp is important. Text remains amazingly important, combined with email. MMS remains very important. The key thing is making sure all of these work together and that your analytics and insights are useful. All software yields a lot of data…the important thing is organizing this around insights so that our customers can understand what they should do based on information in real-time…

“Infusing customer sentiment into day-to-day communication with customers and making sure we’re responsive to how a customer is feeling at any moment has really changed the game. If a person is upset, what in real-time can I automate to resolve that issue for the customer? Sentiment is one of the key data points that inform how an organization should communicate with customers. The ability to do it in real-time across a messaging platform is unique and powerful.”

To hear the rest of the podcast, listen to it online here, or check out The Chat Bubble on your favorite podcast platform.

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