One of big data’s most elusive targets is customer service, a specialized area of market research that demands action.  It’s presented a great opportunity for real-time data analytics, with a number of services cropping up in this space.  Mobile is an important factor as this industry gets fleshed out, layering in location-based data points to further contextualize consumer-related data.  Finding the best mechanism for collecting that data directly from consumers remains the challenge here.

Medallia hopes it has a solution, launching the Medallia Mobile Feedback service this week.  It encourages easy and immediate customer feedback by providing a URL optimized for most connected mobile devices.  It’s an ubiquitous solution that empowers brands to respond even faster to customer service needs.

The Medallia Mobile Feedback allows customers to fill out surveys without having to download any apps. This works well for companies as they don’t have to spend more time, money and effort creating surveys for different platforms.  Also, the new solution provides a mobile-friendly experience for customers that will be consistent with companies’ brand and visual identities. Just like any other Medallia products, the Mobile Feedback Solution empowers companies to take immediate action, such as acknowledging a high score or responding to an unhappy customer.

“Mobile is increasingly how we communicate,” said Borge Hald, CEO and co-founder of Medallia. “There are more than a billion mobile devices and hundreds of millions of smartphones in use today. Medallia Mobile allows businesses to incorporate this key channel into their CEM programs. It collects, analyzes, and reports customer feedback across the most common mobile platforms.”

The appealing thing about the solution is that it works across multiple platforms which include iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerry devices.  It was a certain challenge for Medallia developing a solution that could span Nokia clam shell phones and Apple iPads. And this challenge was predominately technological, as Hald explains.

“Most customers wouldn’t be happy with a big HTML5 survey.  There’s still phones out there that are six years old, and similarly BlackBerry will populate basic HTML differently than Android.  You have to worry about user experience.  We’re using a mobile framework called jQuery to set cross-platform standards for specific mobile experiences and we’re leveraging that.  First we recognize what kind of device is accessing our URL.”

Aside from being compatible with different mobile platforms, Medallia Mobile Feedback also works with speech-to-text-enabled smartphones, such as the newly introduced iPhone 4S, so customers can speak their survey responses into their phones. “Because Medallia Mobile Feedback is so easy to use, more customers will complete a survey on their mobile devices while their experience is still fresh,” said Hald.

There’s a growing interest in gauging customer experiences in as close to real-time as possible.  What the mobile realm does is catalyze the real-time feedback loop, from end user to brand, and back to the end user again.  While Medallia is specific to the customer service sector, opting a mobile URL versus an app, mobile apps are also becoming interesting points of intersection for location-based customer feedback.  Bizzy is one example of this, leveraging social data and location to determine the best opportunity to gain feedback through its “check-out” system.