Recently a friend of mine fell victim to the Facebook 419 scam where his account was taken over and used to send requests for money under the guise that he was stranded in a foreign country. The most frustrating thing for him was the customer service experience being handed off from provider to provider trying to get this issue resolved. Facebook was very slow to respond. The criminals switched the email address on his Facebook account, and the email provider was also slow to respond to the fraud reports. Unfortunately, some of his friends fell victim to the scam and sent money with the criminals receiving the funds posing as my friend, and there was not much recourse that could be taken with the money transfer service provider.

What this highlighted to me was the fact that when consumer services are made up of various providers it can be very challenging to offer a proper level of customer support. This is especially critical when the offered product appears as one end-to-end service to the consumer and the consumer is really unaware of all the parties behind the scene that are needed to make the service available. When you look at Mobile Financial Services there are always many parties involved, whether it be the mobile carriers, banks and other financial institutions, mobile wallet Technology vendors, and the 3rd party financial service providers like money transfer agents. From the end consumer's perspective, they are using a singly branded mobile wallet that offers an aggregated point of entry to all their mobile transactions. So who would they call if their mobile wallet crashes on the handset? who do they call if a recipient didn't receive the sent funds? who do they call if their bank account balance does not match the transaction debits or credits? who do they call if they lose mobile signal midway through a transaction and are unsure the of its final status?

These are all very realistic scenarios and the number of similar consumer issues can be very large. This gets compounded further when you factor in the possibility of criminals using the service to scam and steal from individuals. The reason why I am bringing up this topic today in my blog is because most of the current industry decisions and discussions around technology have always revolved around the mobile wallet on the handset and the communication and security protocols it uses. This is really only one piece of the technology puzzle and I would argue that another piece that is just as, if not more, important is the CRM and Call Center integration to provide all parties a complete 360 view of each mobile subscriber. There must be a strategy in place so that mobile consumers are offered a clear single point of contact for customer support, and that any hand-off between service providers can be done as seamlessly as possible. Unfortunately it seems that this consideration is often neglected and is only sometimes considered towards the end of a product development just before it goes live.

My humble advice is that any organization considering to launch a successful mobile financial services product MUST factor in how it will offer support to its consumers and what technologies it will require to integrate all the parties involved. This consideration must be made from day one and included in all initial business and technology decisions.