Enterprises around the world recognize the need to have “a mobile strategy” for customer care and self service. Yesterday West Interactive announced a partnership with Syclo, a company whose core products and services simplify and accelerate the process of extending applications to multiple mobile platforms.

Syclo, founded in 1995, has a history of working with SAP, IBM and other major enterprise infrastructure providers to extend corporate network services to mobile workers and customers. Its flagship “platform” called Agentry is now integrated with West Interactive’s customer care platform in order to provide West’s customers with ways to interact with mobile customers that has proven to be reliable, scalable and secure.

“Mobile fragmentation” (resulting from the existence of multiple operating systems on smartphones, as well as the staying power of feature phones) has been the bane of the application development community. Over the years Syclo’s has created a software development tool that co-founder Dave Kleban told us enables programmers to create scripts or programs that run as “native apps” without writing any lines of code. Support for multi-modal customer care strategies is a clear benefit.

West Interactive’s programmers can “orchestrate” the end-to-end customer experience across many touchpoints. For example, in the utilities vertical where they have many clients in common, the orchestration of a service call (truck roll) can be accomplished more smoothly when scheduling, notification, confirmation or facilitating changes can be carried out using the medium of the customer’s choice.

The Syclo partnership comes on the heals of a deal with Radian6 (now part of Salesforce.com) to define a way for West’s clients to incorporate feedback from social networks into the customer care loop. It shows that West is willing to identify and forge relationships with “best-of-breed” technology providers to bring its clients into the age of social/mobile aka Conversational Commerce.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile services, customer care, Mobile Speech Apps, West Interactive