Twenty years ago the words “the customer is always right” rang in the ears of every shop worker in the world. If the customer didn’t like your store, staff or your products, chances are they wouldn’t come back and would use simple word of mouth to tell their friends about you… those friends would tell their friends and so on.

Meanwhile its always been the case that good customer service isn’t spoken about nearly half as often as bad service is. Fast forward 20 years and we are in the midst of the greatest socio – economic technology advances the world has ever seen. The internet of things continues to enrapture us, Mobile Apps are prevalent on every major retailer or service provider. I can choose to pay in ten different ways and never actually use the coinage of the land and I can receive rewards and offers in real-time whilst I am in-store and redeem them using my mobile device on the retailers epos system.

Its not easy…. a retailer has to get their customer communications right across several different digital channels. One bad experience and its all over the internet, on social platforms like Facebook and on forums who reach out to millions in seconds where word of mouth reached hundreds in the same time frame less than two decades ago.

Retailers know all this of course and the clever ones are doing some if not all of the things I mentioned above. However depending on where their retail business fits into the chain, they might struggle to know what part of the customer journey to start with.

Is it in-store? Before they come in? When they are still at home via the website and social media?  Each customer is different, they all want different things and what is important to one wont be important to someone else.

However, lets look at us as consumers… we live in a digital age, everything that took days twenty years ago, now takes minutes. The technological advances that have ensured the simple mobile phone was adopted globally in less than 15 years (It took 60 years for the TV to have anywhere near global adoption) have meant that we have become impatient and expect instant service, communications and bigger and better opportunities.

Ask anyone in the world and after the Russians they would tell you that the British love to queue.. no one on the planet queued with the same etiquette that we did. With the birth of the “millennials” that is all set to change. These young men and women, born post 2000 have never known a time without mobile phones, internet connectivity or WiFi. They search, they talk to friends, they pay without cash… and they do it in real-time.. they don’t know the meaning of the word wait!!

When these customer come to your bricks and mortar store they wont wait in queues, they wont wait for service, they want to get in and get out.

That’s where FAST TRACK ORDERING via SMS comes in..it allows you to control queues in your store, gives customers a quick and efficient way to pick up their products and joins your website and mobile presence into your overarching customer service strategy.

A customer can go on-line and order or reserve a product to be picked up in-store – a simple API call can be added into the website which can check the stock, confirm the availability of the product, pick up dates available and collection code.

The customer has already paid on-line and they have chosen the option to pick up in-store rather than wait for it to be delivered. They receive a text with all the information they need on it and simply go into the store between the appointed delivery times and give the code on your phone.

Job done.. customer has there product, you have another sale, a happy customer and no queues at the till.

You also have customer data to add into your existing CRM system.

If that’s not enough reason you can also trigger “welcome” messages when someone signs up on the website as a new customer, send “order confirmation” and despatch SMS and do all this in real-time.

SMS is a simple and easy channel to integrate with any of your digital or traditional marketing channels. If you want to improve your customer service then you need to adopt SMS into your business today…

Good Luck

themobileexpert