Category: Blog

How mobile is changing the retail conversation

Mobile communications technology has long played an influential part in business-to-consumer enterprises. But for the competitive retail sector, mobile adoption has become fundamental to survive. With the introduction of ever-smarter devices, and usage showing no signs of slowing down, the future belongs to those businesses that truly embrace the move to mobile.

From Europe to the USA, leading retailers are reporting that 10-15% of their web traffic comes through mobile phones. And this increases to 20% when tablets are thrown into the mix. It’s a transformative technology – one that’s achieved global reach and an integral role in our day-to-day lives. For e-commerce businesses, it provides a convenient, immediate way to engage with consumers, and brings an extra dimension to their retail offering.

Mobile messaging meets the marketing mix

Always on, and always on the go – mobile communication is made for how consumers live daily life. But where a sales call can leave customers feeling cold, mobile messaging offers direct access without the unwanted intrusion. With customers choosing when they read their messages, they stay in control over the brands they engage with – making for a more positive experience.

Mobile messaging has become more than just a direct sales channel. A really robust mobile strategy should see retailers putting the medium to work across the marketing mix:

• More market research – it’s an information exchange, not a one-way street. With messaging services like polling, researchers can gather precise data to pressing questions – and tailor their products or services accordingly.
• Personalised promotions – highly targeted and easily customisable, mobile messaging provides a powerful advertising channel.
• -way communications – whether it’s a reminder to redeem a time-sensitive offer or an invite to an upcoming event, mobile messaging creates instantaneous connections between retailers and customers.

Taking mobile messaging to the shop floor

As mobile messaging continues to cement its place in the marketing mix, more retailers are turning to the platform as an extension of the retail experience itself. Customer notifications, payment processing and customer services can all be managed cost-effectively through mobile messaging. And thanks to revenue-share agreements with mobile communications service providers, companies can build rich new revenue pipelines – all around the world.

6 steps to effective mobile messaging

So how can you capitalise on this fantastic opportunity? The most successful mobile messaging is all about ‘right place, right time’ communications – but thankfully, low costs and detailed metrics make perfecting your approach simple.

1. Get your house in order: first things first, capture your customers’ mobile numbers in your CRM system, and make sure they’ve ‘opted in’ to receive your messages.
2. Branch out: it’s not just about your existing relationships. Working with mobile operators or large media organisations, you can add a carefully curated list of potential customers to your database too.
3. Test your strategy: with relatively low production costs compared with traditional media, mobile messaging is the perfect platform to develop and test your marketing strategy.
4. Think short and sweet: with just 160 characters to play with, mobile messaging is an effective way to communicate with customers that are time-poor or on the move.
5. Strike in seconds: messages can be sent and received almost instantaneously. So you have the flexibility to target customers at the most effective time – for maximum impact.
6. Measure your messages: the ability to measure a range of indicators – including recall, message association, awareness and intent-to-buy – means you can ensure your campaigns always cut through. You can also study the cost associated with customer contact, interaction and acquisition.

While mobile messaging may be just part of the mix, it’s powerful way to target the right customers, with the right messages – at the right time. And for retailers navigating an increasingly competitive market place, it provides invaluable new opportunities for innovation in both your commercial and communication strategies.

It has become something of a cliché, but why do organisations professing to value their customers insist on providing so-called customer service using the conventional call centre model? One can argue that the one thing almost guaranteed to alienate customers is to force them to engage with a call centre. As might be the case in other fields, could Covid-19 be the catalyst for change, forcing organisations to re-consider their approach?

As with the transition that has been made with employees working from their homes, so the time has come to recognise that the technology exists to enable a major overhaul in the way that remote customer care is managed.  Conventional call centres have tended to be associated with long call waiting times, difficult to navigate IVR systems, call queuing technology which cannot cope with routine peak level demand, coupled with low paid, badly trained, transient agents all adds up to an approach that is well past due for a change.

If I am a customer of company X and I am forced to wait on a call, listening to appalling music, intermittently interrupted by pre-recorded announcements telling me that my call is important, but claiming that “our lines are unusually busy” when they are actually just as busy as usual, but not enough agents are available to handle the call load, while the ACD and queueing systems are also unable to handle the calls – then will such an experience endear me to company X? Will I want to remain a customer, or will the experience encourage me to look for an alternative provider for whatever service company X provides?  

Call centres were designed to operate within a traditional, rigidly controlled, hierarchical site-based model. They have failed to evolve, while the technology options to deliver customer service have changed significantly. Add to this the trend towards offshoring, as companies sought to squeeze costs out of the customer service model and the result is poor service, poor customer communications and a customer service model that is at odds with any notion of service.

This does not have to be the prevailing condition for the customer service model, but an acknowledgement of the issues, coupled with a change in approach is required. Before I trot out the inevitable digital transformation platitudes, let’s pause and think about what we are trying to achieve with these lumbering and hopelessly out of touch approaches to customer service.

Call centres are now increasingly being referred to as contact centres. The distinction might be subtle, but it does reveal a truth about the process, which is a central place (Freephone number), used by a customer to make contact about some sort of customer service issue – frequently a billing related issue, but also for customers seeking technical support, product support and so on. If the objective is to make contact, then the options need to be extended beyond the phone, towards more of an omni-channel communications mix. This places the phone and the awful IVR experience as one channel, among many others – including Email, Web, SMS, Mobile App, Social Media, ChatApp and so on.

Of course individually these are not panaceas. The use of Chatbots can be significantly more frustrating than trying to interact with an IVR. But the trick is not one or the other, but a blending of different media, to divert as much traffic as possible away from the over-worked agents. Self-Help portals, Mobile Apps, communications via SMS can divert common questions away from agents, leaving the agents free to deal with more complex cases, thus enriching their work and even justifying investment in better training. There’s a lot of work that can be done using digital replacements. The reality is that good systems do exist to provide alternative support channels.

Quite apart from the use of digital tools for customer self-help, is the issue of the way call centres are set-up. The need to concentrate a large number of agents in a single building, often in cramped conditions has been significantly altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic technology options existed to enable agents to work from home. The idea of complex, on-premise systems has been replaced by cloud contact centre solutions, making it positively beneficial to have agents working from home. If you can access everything you need to manage your job from anywhere, then the options for flexible working become more interesting, both for the agents as well as for the contact centre managers. With a cloud based approach to delivering contact centre technology not only is there no need to maintain expensive infrastructure, but agents can juggle work-life balance better and management can monitor traffic volumes and bring agents online as they are needed. For example extra agents can be brought online during peak load times and then then can go offline to ensure a preferred work-life balance. This flexible working, which might once have been seen as either impossible or a perk, can and should become the new normal for contact centres.

It is to be hoped that if there can be any upside from Covid-19 that it will initiate change in the approach that organisations take to providing customer service. Customer service should no longer be regarded as a race to the bottom, to provide the lowest cost, worst possible service. The technology exists to overhaul customer service, to make it more efficient, and more pleasing. Adoption of these new ways of working might actually result in delivering real customer service and even in delighting customers.