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Tag: Mobile Communication

  • Harnessing The Power Of Mobile Communication For Your Business

    Harnessing The Power Of Mobile Communication For Your Business

    As technology changes so does the way we interact with each other. Before smartphones and ordering online, popping into a shop to search for a particular item or calling around to find it before heading out were both common things to do. The internet and later smartphones changed all that. Now we have access to whatever information we need right at our fingertips at all times. If we are searching for something hard to find we can simply order it online. If we are planning to go purchase something in person or we want more information about an item before we buy it, we often consult our smartphones for further information rather than asking a store employee for help. In fact, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 69% of people would rather search for information on their phones instead of asking for help from a store employee, and the pandemic has just made this practice all the more practical.

    All the information and technology we carry around in our pockets has changed the way we interact with the world. We send text messages and emails more frequently than calling now and if we don’t know something it’s just a matter of knowing how to find it. With the spread of the pandemic accessing information has become even more crucial. We can look up mask policies and procedures before we go to a business, find out if a business has special hours for those with disabilities and the elderly, and look up every-changing hours and services.

    Consumers And Mobile Communication

    Before the pandemic, 81% of consumers used mobile to manage finances, while 79% used mobile to make online purchases. Any why wouldn’t they? The days of getting up and going to the computer every time you wanted to look something up, pay a bill online, or buy something are long over.

    Increasingly, stores are giving information to consumers that they have never given out before. One of the things customers can look for online with many businesses is not only where an item is located in a store, but also how many of that item are in stock at any given time. Customers want accurate information and they want it now, as their time is becoming more valuable than ever. What’s more, knowing you will find what you are looking for before you leave the house is actually pretty critical during the age of social distancing.

    Mobile Communication In Retail

    Communicating with customers is changing thanks to the mobile revolution. Answering phone calls from customers is no longer the main interaction with them. In fact, 85% of those who own smartphones prefer text messages to calls or even emails, which means that businesses that aren’t responsive to this type of communication are likely missing out on customers.

    55% of people ignore marketing emails because they get too many emails, and 29% never listen to voicemail. On the other hand, 90% of people open a text message within minutes. In fact, there is a:

    Before the COVID-19 pandemic 68% of businesses were already using some form of messaging to connect with their customers. This placed them in a considerably better position when the pandemic hit because they already had the infrastructure in place to meet the changing needs of customers in response to social distancing.

    Now customers need information before they show up to a business, and mobile messaging is the way they often prefer to receive it. Curbside pickup has doubled since last year and 59% of customers plan to continue using it after the pandemic passes, and this service is made possible through the use of mobile messaging.

    Mobile Communication In Foodservice

    Mobile ordering and messaging has also been a boon to restaurants since the start of the pandemic. In many places restaurants have only been open for takeout orders, so having apps and messaging abilities for taking orders and telling customers when their orders are ready has helped them to run on a skeleton crew while making the changes necessary to function as a takeout only business.

    In March of this year pizza deliveries went up 44% in a single week, and many companies used online ordering and mobile communication to ensure contactless deliveries.

    As restaurants begin to reopen with new social distancing guidelines in place, mobile messaging helps to keep communication going for reservations, when tables are ready, and more.

    Mobile Communication In Medicine

    Accessing medical services has been challenging because of the pandemic, and early on laws were relaxed to allow people to access telehealth services. In order to make the transition easier for medical providers and patients alike, all messaging and video call services were allowed so that doctors could get care to those who needed it via whatever means they were able to use. Teladoc saw a 50% increase in use in the first week alone.

    Mobile messaging can be used for appointment reminders, prescription refill verifications, and more, and 72% of organizations plan to implement more and better digital customer experiences throughout the rest of 2020.

    Mobile Communication In Customer Service

    When it comes to customer complaints, nothing makes customers angrier than sitting on hold for hours waiting for their call to be answered, which makes it not the best way to solve customer complaints to begin with.

    Chats and mobile messaging give customers the ability to initiate contact and then do other things while they await a response. It’s a much less stressful way to deal with contacting customer service, and it’s a lot more effective than airing out grievances on social media, which can come back around with undesirable consequences later on.

    But text messaging has to go both ways. It’s not enough to send marketing messages via SMS, businesses also need to be able to respond to messages they receive. One in three customers report sending a message to a company and never hearing back from them, and in many cases it is simply because the company has not enabled two way messaging.

    65% of customers have positive feelings toward businesses that offer messaging as a means of communication, likely because it shows the company respects the customer’s communication style and choices.

    Harnessing The Power Of Mobile Communications

    Customers say that businesses that offer messaging respect their time, which makes them more likely to choose to do business with that company. It also means those happy customers are more likely to recommend that business to friends and family.

    As technology changes, the ways that businesses interact with customers have to keep up with the times. The first rule of customer service is to meet customers where they are, and if that means hanging up the phone and sending out a text message that’s how it has to be.

    Mobile communication is likely to hinge on SMS messages for some time to come, and businesses that aren’t already using this method are missing out on business. Is your business ready to harness the power of mobile communication?

  • Is The Internet Officially A Basic Utility Now?

    Winter seems to have finally remembered that it has somewhere to be this year – here – so it’s time to dig the space heater out of the closet and get your warm on. Or, at least, that’s what you’d expect people to do in light of the arrival of frigid climes but it turns out keeping the heat on might not be as high as it once was on the list of people’s priorities this winter.

    Unless, that is, most people would prefer to huddle around their electronic devices to steal the warmth off of their over-worked processors because, given how people are spending their money on household services these days, that may be what they resort to this year.

    How indispensable have your technology utilities – cell phones, Internet, etc. – become in your everyday life? How would you prioritize these expenses among traditional utilities like water, gas, and electricity? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section.

    iYogi, a research initiative that examines the technology issues of today, has conducted a study that found that, among the 1100 people surveyed, 63% of people spend almost 35% more on technology bills than utility bills. For the purposes of this study, the services filed under the “technology bills” category are Internet Service Provider bills, mobile communication services, and multimedia services (cloud storage, subscriptions to Netflix-like services, etc.).

    The importance of having a reliable Internet service in the home isn’t incredibly hard to grasp when you consider that “the average American home with two family members own as many as 7 IP devices.” Phones, tablets, laptops, online streaming services – these technological implements add up quickly. As you can imagine, the quantity of IP devices increases as the amount of household members grows. Households with 3 to 7 members may have upwards of 11 IP devices. That the quantity of devices doesn’t increase commensurately with the amount of household members suggests that some of these IP devices are likely shared, the Internet (since you can connect multiple devices onto one wireless network).

    iYogi explains how the constantly increasing inventory of PCs, tablets, printers, scanners, cameras, and digital music players “is driving a new consumer demand for tech support services.” Add to the mix “smart phones, gaming devices, and Internet-enabled televisions and set top boxes are becoming a critical part of the home.”

    Indeed we are in the thick of the digital age, so now that American households are beginning to fully weave Internet and mobile communication into their everyday lives in such dedicated ways, have online services become as necessary as water and electric utilities? Considering how many households have become seemingly dependent on the Internet, it looks like it could shape up that way.

    Perhaps the biggest aspect to consider now that Americans are wired to the teeth these days is: how much is all of this costing us? iYogi says that “the average monthly expense [on mobile services] was found to be $94.” Add to that the average $19 per month that people fork over to download games, apps, music and the like and you’ve turned a pricey bill into a more pricey bill. As you can imagine, “the increasing popularity of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is only likely to see increased spendings on mobile communication in the future.”

    And then there’s the actual ISP bill. iYogi found that 58% of people can spend anywhere between $20 and $180 on monthly ISP service bills. (An aside: it’s probably not surprising that people would spend a lot of money on their Internet service, but that’s a really big range of expense. That’s like the difference between saying “I want to eat one hot dog for lunch” and “I want to win the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.” But I digress.) While the cost of subscribing to an ISP will depend on the data plan, the sum of money spent inflates as you include Internet-based services like Netflix. Corroborating what we have previously reported, this change in habit “has seen TV take a backseat as an entertainment medium.”

    As if the technology tab wasn’t high enough, now people are beginning to pay for yet another service: cloud-based storage. While 30% of people currently spend an average of $10 per month for cloud services, iYogi expects this figure “is only going to increase as comfort levels with these new services go up.”

    So given all of this habituated use of online services, is it valid to say that the Internet is an essential utility – at least inside of what iYogi describes as “digital homes” – as opposed to an elective commodity? Granted, nobody needs the Internet to stay alive the way they need heat to cook their food or water to drink and bathe. But people, I’d argue, have re-created the Internet as a need insofar it has become the linchpin of our communication infrastructure.

    And it’s not as if people have recently realized they have stacks of extra cash laying around and decided to get themselves a Home 2.0. I don’t think you can make the case that people have more expendable income because economic growth has been near-flatlining in the United States for several years now. There’s been a nudge of economic recovery in the past year or so, but hardly enough to generate enough excess income in American households where they can spend the money on “superfluous” amenities like smartphones and high-speed Internet.

    It’s not that people want the Internet anymore; more and more, people need the Internet.

    Whether technology finds a space in an updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t matter: people are increasingly becoming dependent upon the Internet. And given how integrated the Internet is to our lives, a lack of it would drastically change the way we live these days. Sure, some bugbears will contest this notion with antiquated protests like, “We were getting along fine before the Internet so we can easily do without it now.” That’s true, we were doing fine, but we were also getting along fine before indoor plumbing, penicillin, and a national highway system but does anybody truly want to return to a way of life when those now-standard amenities don’t exist? I doubt it. It’s not about the bare minimum of resources on which humans can continue to survive – it’s about what improves the quality of life.

    As for the future, iYogi doesn’t foresee the proliferation of Internet-enabled households slowing down anytime soon, so again, at what point does the Internet become a necessity and less of a luxury? Could you go without the Internet these days or is it as necessary as warm water and reliable light sources? Do you see the prevalence of Internet in our way of life as a good thing or a bad thing? Share your opinions in the comments below.

  • Pinger Says Germany Is 1st Stop in Taking Free Texting Global

    Since texting is one of the most common functions on mobile devices these days, it’s no wonder that free texting applications have become extremely popular. Those of us in the U.S. have become accustomed to these abilities, but unfortunately, people in other countries have not been so lucky, until now.

    Pinger, a mobile application, recently announced that it would be extending its free mobile communication services to Europe. Beginning in Germany later this summer, the company will allow users to send and receive text messages and phone calls for free. This is quite an achievement given the heavily regulated European market.

    As Joe Sipher, the Chief Product/Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Pinger, explained to WebProNews, the capitalist system and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped to keep prices down in the U.S.

    “It’s cheap enough where we can actually make money on our advertising model and still pay for every text and pay for every phone number,” he said of the system in the U.S.

    It’s quite the opposite in Europe since the costs associated with sending and receiving a text to a carrier are 700-800 times more than costs in America. For example, the carriers in European countries, such as Germany, pay each other when a customer sends a text.

    In other words, if a customer with Carrier A sends a text to a customer with Carrier B, Carrier A has to pay Carrier B a specified amount. However, if the customer with Carrier B responds to the customer with Carrier A, Carrier B will also have to pay Carrier A the same amount. So, basically, the back-and-forth transactions cancel each other out. The carriers still make money though, because they are charging their customers more than the amount that they have to pay out.

    Pinger’s patent-pending technology is a symmetry model that neutralizes these high costs by ensuring that no user sends more texts than he receives.

    “The real cost of sending and receiving texts in Europe is zero,” said Sipher. “As long as you send as many messages as you receive, there really is no cost; and then, we can layer our advertising model right on top of it.”

    To make this model work, it incorporates a gaming factor that gives each user a meter with 100 points. Once a user sends a text, his meter shows it has 90 points. If he receives a text in return, his meter goes back up to 100 points. If a user begins to run low on his points, he can send a message via his email or Facebook wall to encourage friends to text him to push his points back up, an aspect that Pinger learned from its sister company Zynga.

    “It fits right into the existing model,” said Sipher. “We’re just entering in as another carrier.”

    There are plenty of companies that create great services and offer them for free initially, but then decide to charge its customers. When asked about this trend, Sipher told us that Pinger would not follow suit.

    “The difference between us and the people that say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna charge later,’ is that we’ve made free profitable for us,” he said.

    He believes that their model will help them expand into multiple other countries and not only simplify mobile communications, but also reduce the cost of them for all users.

    “I think we can take this model into many, many parts of the world,” said Sipher.