Smart devices and social media will drive an always-connected customer culture during 2013, with vendors advised to step up or risk losing business.

That is according to Ovum, who says new analytics solutions, multichannel metrics, and better collaboration tools will be crucial next year, as enterprises feel the pressure to understand and pre-empt the needs from the always-connected customer.

“Enterprises need to support today’s customers by providing timely and accurate responses via mobile, web, and voice channels,” says says Aphrodite Brinsmead, senior analyst at Ovum.

“In order to succeed, they must address customer needs at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and support and integrate data internally.

“It makes sense for enterprises to create collaborative customer experience teams in order to align technology and data strategies across product, IT, marketing, and customer support.”

Exploring changes in the customer experience and interaction market, Ovum says technologies are evolving to meet new consumer demands, providing recommendations for both enterprises and vendors.According to the report, social media response teams will move into the contact centre.

Such moves will drive the need for better social media management tools, with Ovum forecasting high growth (21% CAGR) for social media monitoring within the customer service function in the next five years.

Other predictions include:

· Mobile self-service will become more intelligent, allowing customers the ability to request a callback from within a mobile application. This will then become easier to transfer a query from a self-service application to voice, chat, or email according to the advisory company.

· Traditionally siloed applications such as performance management, business intelligence, and customer feedback will be merged into voice-of-the-customer (VOC) analytics suites which help enterprises view and compare data across different stages of the customer lifecycle.

· Many enterprises will have a mixture of cloud- and premise-based customer service solutions, although, for most companies, core automated call distribution (ACD) functionality is likely to remain on-premise for the foreseeable future because of existing investments and mentality.