How many Americans carry smartphones nowadays? While precise numbers may vary (and the percentage is certainly still growing), it’s fairly safe to say, “Most of them.” We’re an on-the-go population, like many other nations, and we frequently have at least one method of connecting to the Internet on us at all times. For the increasing number of people who carry tablets in addition to smartphones, it’s a bit like becoming a walking data center.

We do many things on our smartphones: talk, text, e-mail, Web surf and even video chat. Increasingly, however, we’re also doing our bill paying, our banking and our shopping over our phones. This fact has given rise to the idea of mobile customer service.

Richard Dumas of hosted contact center solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert) recently attended Salesforce’s Dreamforce event, where he attended a session called “Four Key Steps to Getting Started in Mobile Customer Support.” The session featured speakers Brad Cleveland and Sarah Stealey Reed from ICMI. According to Dumas, they had a number of recommendations to make for implementing a mobile customer support program.

Such a program would appear to be necessary. ICMI’s survey found that while the number of smartphones in the U.S. is staggering and still growing, the majority of businesses (61 percent) don’t currently support mobile customers.

“That’s a wee bit of a problem if you believe that the number of devices and apps will only increase,” wrote Dumas.

As with any new program, the business needs to start with a strategy. What are competitors doing on the mobile front? What are customers indicating they want? In what scenarios would they be likely to use an app to contact a customer representative? Who would support mobile customer service in the organization? Would it offer a competitive advantage?

Once needs are determined and a strategy is in place, the mobile channel must be integrated with the contact center so it can be treated as any other customer contact point: put into queues and handled by the next available agent, or by a designated mobile support expert, whichever a company decides is best. Mobile channels may have different service levels, different expected handle times and a different kind of urgency, particularly if the outreach comes from good customers. Be sure that you can set these preferences and stick to them.

 If your company would like to provide users with a mobile app, ensure that you are offering the best possible app, created and tested by professionals (and retested by the company itself to ensure that it works).  Be sure that it’s easy and user friendly and that it can be integrated into the mix of contact center channels. (In other words, this is no place for your brother-in-law, a guy who once designed a pretty okay app to pick the right fly fishing lure, to try his hand at developing an enterprise app.)

All and all, it’s impossible to deny that the mobile Internet now rules the telecommunications world. If your company isn’t prepared to serve customers via this increasingly important channel, you may ultimately find that you don’t have any customers left.