The future for retailers in a mobile environment

Mobile seems to be everywhere you look and is changing the way people interact and use information. You can now find information instantly from practically wherever you are and at any time and this is changing the face of retail.

Gone are the days where you could only shop when retailers were open. With the introduction of the Internet, people are able to shop from home, or on breaks at work, allowing people to shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Now, mobile is able to offer even more convenience as customers can shop wherever they wish - from home or on the move - and they can use even more channels to connect to the Internet such as a traditional PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone to do so. This improves the customer experience as it allows shoppers to fit shopping into their busy lives, using whichever device they wish. Retailers must recognise this growing new channel and respond appropriately.

An article in Tech Advisor, The promises of "Omni-Channel" retailing, proposes that location, product, price, quality and service are no longer differentiating factors for retailers and there are five new factors which are relevant today in a mobile environment. These are:

1. Connecting - shoppers connect to the Internet or mobile to find product information. This needs to be available to both the shopper and staff in the shop.
2. Predictive - retailers must look at customers and predict in real time, rather than relying on historical data.
3. Personalisation - making a personal offer to each shopper in real time.
4. Context aware - making the offer at the right time and the right place whilst in your store or nearby. 
5. In-store experience - shoppers today are looking for information, product details and product comparison and this should be enabled within the store.

These five factors focus on real-time information, knowledge and treating customers personally with tailored offers.  Even better, it focuses on ensuring that staff within a store are equipped with as much knowledge as a customer. This helps ensure customers find what they are looking for in a convenient and speedy manner.

An article in The Guardian, Omni-channel retail: joining up the consumer experience, states that retailers are able to improve engagement and convenience through omni-channel retail. They, as well as many others, argue that it is important for retailers to provide a consistent experience across all channels that shoppers may use as if retailers fail to offer this, they may lose that customer completely.

The retail experience within a store cannot be undervalued. By visiting a store, shoppers can have a face to face interaction, compare products more easily and have questions answered quickly. However, showrooming is becoming a more prominent trend within retail where shoppers go online via their mobile phones to compare in-store prices with competitors’ prices. This is why it is crucial for retailers to adopt an omni-channel approach to guarantee they price competitively and also ensure the in-store experience is first class, as well as the customer experience across all other channels.

Mobile is certainly changing the face of retail and it is vital that the importance of this channel is recognised by retailers to secure their continued existence.  Find out how retailers can enhance the mobile shopping experience or read our Retail section to find out more.

For further information regarding HSL Mobile, visit us at:

http://www.hslmobile.com

follow us on LinkedIn, @hslmobile, Facebook or Google+

or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@hslmobile.com

Mobile making waves for UK retailers

There is huge momentum in the UK for consumers using their mobile phones to buy goods and services. eMarketer recently revealed that mobile commerce sales in the UK alone are expected to account for 26.5% of all online sales by 2017.

There is no doubt about it. Mobile is an increasingly important channel for retailers to engage existing customers and win new customers. However, according to Mastek, more than a fifth of the top 50 online UK retailers do not have an app or a mobile website.

Retailers - both traditional brick and mortar stores and online retailers - must not ignore this growing channel as they risk losing valuable customers and potential new sales. Indeed, some retailers can find it difficult to decide whether to develop an app or a mobile optimised site, or both, but they should not fail to offer either option to shoppers. Hopefully, Cisco Customer Experience Research finding that only 27% of shoppers use mobile apps will make this decision a little bit easier for retailers.

Retailers must also try and understand how their shoppers are using mobile as part of online shopping as this will help determine how they cater for mobile customers and optimise the shopping experience.

When it comes to where and how consumers are shopping via mobile devices, research by Shoppercentric finds that many actually do so from the comfort of their own home, rather than ‘on the move’. This raises some important considerations for retailers as there will be differences in connectivity, speed of internet, and the goal of the shopper – to find information, check prices, buy online or buy from a retail store.

They also found interesting age differences in how mobile devices are used as part of the shopping experience. For example, people aged 55 and over were more likely to use a tablet device as part of the buying process. When it comes to price checking and finding deals, it was found mobile devices were most used for this purpose by 35 to 54 year olds, and it was the 18 to 24 year olds that were most likely to use mobile for finding promotions such as discounts, offers and vouchers.

It is therefore crucial that retailers examine their own customer base and their target customers to determine their mobile strategy. For example, if you sell to the older generation you can expect that a significant proportion will use a tablet device as part of the shopping process over a smartphone device. This can influence how you to develop a mobile site as tablets have larger screens and bigger buttons, making it easier to navigate than smartphones. However, if you are wanting to capture consumers between 18 to 24 years old, you may be best offering discounts, offers and vouchers. For consumers where pricing is important, it is important to ensure pricing is competitive.

Learn more about how retailers can enhance the mobile shopping experience or read our Retail section to find out more.

For further information regarding HSL Mobile, visit us at:

http://www.hslmobile.com

follow us on LinkedIn, @hslmobile, Facebook or Google+

or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@hslmobile.com

HSL Mobile's IM/SMS Service and Enterprise Messaging

Last month HSL Mobile announced the upcoming release of their IM/SMS offering, a messaging service that combines instant messaging (IM) with SMS to give enterprises secure and far reaching messaging. This blog briefly touches on the various means of messaging within enterprises and discusses the future of enterprise messaging with regards to IM/SMS.  

Email for enterprise messaging

For decades email has been the most popular method of communication technology within organisations that was available on a computer or, more recently, a mobile.  It allows people to discuss, direct and distil their work while optionally attaching documents and other files. Brevity and immediacy is not what email is about and people can talk at length if they so wish, press “send” when they’re done and then their email will usually reach the recipient in under a minute or maybe longer if that email has large attachments.  

SMS for enterprise messaging

Although SMS has been around since 1992, its use in enterprise has only recently started to gain momentum. SMS has a number of standout features:

• It is immediate.
• It can reach everyone who has a mobile.
• It’s more likely to get someone’s attention than an email.
• Depending on the alert tone used when a text message is received it can get the recipient’s attention as good as a voice call.
• It is normally available even in poor coverage and will work when Internet access doesn’t.

On the negative side, compared to email and IM it is more expensive and, while being largely immediate, it can sometimes be subject to delays. SMS certainly does have its place in enterprises and can be used from customer interaction to internal communication; however SMS is limiting and can often be inappropriate to use. Consideration needs to be given to cost, security, convenience and its effectiveness for a particular communication purpose.

Instant messaging for enterprise messaging

Instant Messaging, otherwise known as IM, is relatively new compared with SMS and email but its popularity is exceeding that of SMS. Its success could well be down to it matching the five attributes that Gartner believe next generation communication services will embrace:

1. Symmetrical
2. Personal/intimate
3. Frequent
4. Immediacy
5. Acknowledgement.

IM is symmetrical in that there is a one-to-one relationship in a conversation. Personal/intimate means there’s a strong personal dimension to the communication. It’s frequent in terms of how often the service is used. And immediacy meaning it’s real-time or near real-time communication. Finally, acknowledgement is about getting a message acknowledged, a factor that is important as conversations are real-time and contextual.

What is the future of enterprise messaging?

The growth of IM is significant and is being widely used where email once was. IM suits the more frequent “chatty” interactions than email and has even replaced some face-to-face communication, as well as encouraging communication where none may have previously taken place.

However, it is unlikely that email will be replaced by SMS as both email and SMS are very much complimentary, something that is particularly the case where smartphone usage is high. It remains to be seen how much life SMS still has but it's a fact that the rate of growth of SMS has been reducing and will inevitably at some point go into decline. It should be noted though that while consumer use of SMS is reaching its peak, enterprise use of SMS is likely some way off from reaching its own peak. While this is happening IM's rate of growth is not likely to diminish at all.

So where does HSL Mobile's IM/SMS fit...?

It's a messaging system for use with your desktop, laptop, tablet and/or mobile offering a variety of ways for team members to connect and, as the "IM/SMS" name implies, it allows messaging via IM or SMS. The service can be accessed whether you have a smartphone switched on and even if you are not running the IM/SMS app.

In terms of the team members who will be using IM/SMS, the focus is on the act of messaging - sending and receiving messages - not unnecessarily burdening them with the underlying technologies used to deliver their messages or the poor network coverage they may be experiencing. The aim is to make it as simple as possible for team members using the system, allowing them to focus on the task at hand.

This combination of instant messaging and SMS brings together the respective benefits of IM and SMS in an enterprise messaging service and additionally excels in terms of security, reliability and regulatory compliance. We believe we've built a service that gives enterprises an exceptionally robust and secure messaging service, engineered so it can be depended on not only for regular chat between team members but for critical business processes.

We also like to think of IM/SMS as innovative. It's not only an enterprise messaging service for team members talking with other team members, it also enables applications to talk with those team members, customers and other external parties or even other applications. However, we will not explore the very interesting opportunities this presents in this blog.

The IM/SMS messaging service is expected to encourage the use of SMS - where it is appropriate to be used - and enable the switching of messaging away from SMS where IM is more appropriate. It is also expected to help accelerate the adoption of IM within enterprises and to replace existing IM systems that deliver little benefit when compared with IM/SMS.

The benefits of this new innovative service for enterprise messaging are plentiful. Please get in touch to learn more or keep up to date with our developments by following us on any of our social media platforms listed below.

For further information regarding HSL Mobile, visit us at:

http://www.hslmobile.com

follow us on LinkedIn, @hslmobile, Facebook or Google+

or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@hslmobile.com

How can travel apps make a difference?

There are millions of apps flooding the market that are tailored specifically for travelling and to assist in all stages of the travel journey. 

We are much more likely to use our mobile devices today to research and book a trip with Hotels.com stating that 1 in 4 people research their holidays via their mobile phones whilst at work. 

It is therefore essential that apps are available in the market to help people find information quickly (and slyly for those at work) as well as making the booking process as seamless as possible to encourage people to book there and then rather than leave a time delay where they may change their mind.

When it comes to the design of an app, companies should cater for smaller screens and smaller buttons to encourage people to use the app and find value. It is important to remember that any unnecessary information that is not critical or useful to the visitor should be removed to simplify the information held within the app and make it as easy as possible to find what they are looking for.

Nielsen, xAd and Telmetrics' new study Mobile Path to Purchase found price, deals, reviews and location-related look-ups were the most important criteria for people researching via their mobiles. Apps for booking travel must therefore include this information in an easy to use layout to help increase the number of customers using their services.

There are apps exclusively designed to make the travel experience itself more enriching. For example, The Heathrow Airport Guide is a free app and includes live flight tracking and status updates, interactive terminal maps, shop guides, restaurant listings and many more features, just for Heathrow Airport. For a traveller, this helps make the journey more enjoyable and straightforward, and gives them more information on any potential delays, helping them plan ahead and make any necessary arrangements if needed.

Mobile apps are also said to be changing the way we use information. TripAdvisor is now the second most downloaded travel app following Google Earth for planning travel. A great example of one of their apps is City Guides which can be used offline and therefore not accruing any roaming fees. Each city guide provides itineraries given by experts, local area maps, reviews of top visitor attractions, and a “Point Me There” function that directs travellers to places using the GPS on the mobile, as well as being able to share their experiences on Facebook via a journal.

These apps help ensure people gain the best possible travel experience and gives travellers advice and useful tips when they need it. Enabling travellers to get to places using transport links helps travellers get to places quickly and avoid the dreaded panic of getting lost.

By providing these types of services for travellers, helps strengthen customer relationships. Learn more about how mobile technology is helping the travel industry or read our Transport section to find out more.

For further information regarding HSL Mobile, visit us at:

http://www.hslmobile.com

follow us on LinkedIn, @hslmobile, Facebook or Google+

or call us on +44 (0)1506 605 260

or email us at sales@hslmobile.com