Half of UK contact centres plan to support mobile technology for customer contact within the next 12 to 18 months, new research has shown.

According to the study of 100 organisations by Aspect, 86% of respondents either currently have the technical infrastructure in place or are planning to do so.

However, over a third of those surveyed admitted they’re not considering supporting mobile technology for customer engagement at the moment with cost (capital and on-going) and legacy systems cited as the biggest barriers to mobile adoption.

Meanwhile, the research showed that over 40% of those surveyed regard inbound customer service as the most useful application for mobile customer contact technology.

Mark King, SVP of European Sales at Aspect, said: “Contact centres are investing in support for mobile technologies, which offer both the consumer and the supplier a convenient communications channel. Perhaps crucially for many organisations, mobile provides a self-service first-point-of-contact that may reduce the need to interact with an organisation all together and help drive call avoidance strategies.”

Gartner recently forecasted that tablet computers will outsell desktop and laptop sales by 60% by 2015 whilst Ofcom reported that the majority of the UK population now own at least one mobile device.

King added: “Development in enterprise networking, data centre capability and better bandwidth, as well as the proliferation of unified communications (UC) enablers such as Microsoft Lync, have re-affirmed the benefits of mobile communications in business, and now it is stretching to customer engagement.”