Mobile Communication Key As Customer Evolves
Anyone wanting to communicate with a base of users, be it consumers, partner companies or employees has to come to the realisation that the user has changed.
Access through multiple devices to whatever information consumers are looking for has made them far more informed and therefore much more demanding, says Lourens Botha, e-commerce advisor and lecturer. Botha was also responsible for the creation of McCarthy Call-a-car a decade ago.
“If you consider the points of contact with people include TV, radio, print, PC (internet and email), cellphone and landline, then one has to re-think the way you communicate with people because the users of today undoubtedly have more information at their fingertips,” he says.
“Getting their attention, let alone getting your message across is therefore far more challenging. And when they come knocking on your door they are far better informed, which means your service offerings need to slick and informative otherwise they’ll just go somewhere else.”
The stats on communication mediums tell a story of how many channels people receive information through. The three cellphone networks together claim to have a combined base of over 36 million subscribers1; there are an estimated 24.5 million adult TV viewers in South Africa, and over 28.5 million radio listeners2; with PCs and landlines coming in around the five million mark3.
Given the ease of access to information and the amount of marketing messages in the market, Botha says companies need to re-think the way they communicate and the messages they send out into the market.
Riaan Groenewald, Multimedia Solutions Operations Director, says through the haze of information access, the cellphone stands out because it is the only device that is carried in people’s pockets.
“While the cellphone will increasingly become the most effective way to reach someone, the challenge to companies is that people don’t want to receive what they consider to be unnecessary information on their phone because of the importance a cellphone plays in people’s everyday life,” he says.
Botha says the first stage for companies wanting to build an effective communication campaign is to know more about their customer database and their preferred method of communication.
“The reality is even the cellular networks have very little information on their clients’ personal preferences. And if companies are not aware of what kind of information people want to receive via their cellphone, then they risk alienating the user, with messaging being labled as spam or irrelevant information,” he says.
Groenewald says as a result unless companies are using SMS as purely a notification service, they need to think communicating with MMS and .mobi websites.
“MMS are content rich including video, sounds, pictures and can have specific text for the user, utilising their name and providing them with information they want to receive (presuming the company has done its home work on what the user wants.),” Groenewald says.
“Furthermore the consumer has the choice of whether to accept or reject an incoming MMS and should be able to unsubscribe from the service at any time.”
Companies then need to think about when they communicate with their base (week days and office hours for example) and how regularly they communicate with them as not to alienate the receiver.
MMS also stands out from other mediums because it is not only free to download, but can give users something in addition, Groenwald adds. For example, backing music on an MMS can be saved as a ringtone, graphics can be saved as wallpapers and incentives can be given to the user including entry into a competition or receiving a bar-coded digital voucher via MMS for responding to the MMS.
Botha says mobile communication will not only have more of an impact in future because of its ability to reach people more effectively than other mediums but because of the experience mobile communications offers and the peripheral benefits mobile communication provides.
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