Over the past 7 years, we have come up with all manner of cock-a-maynee plans for using text messaging in every day business life. Everything from ordering pizza and plumbers to testing for the sobriety of concert going teenagers. I’ve been amazed at what people can come up with. Having said that, some strategies have been better than others for helping you to build your business. Here are the top five uses for SmartNote.
Number 5: Reminders
There is nothing worse than making an appointment with someone, turning up, only to find they have forgotten. If you are an estate agent, you have virtually guaranteed to come across this situation at least a couple of times a month. Propertyteam have been using SmartNote to remind viewers of appointments for years now and scheduling reminders has become so useful that Martin O’Mahony, MD of PropertyTeam says “this software is the best technology purchase I have ever made”. Staff send out reminders for those dreaded Saturday morning appointments and if someone can’t make it - they call to cancel.
Number 4: Keeping the troops up to date
The IMO are a busy bunch. They co-ordinate a variety of services for consultants and doctors all over the country. This mobile buch aren’t often at a desk so sending out a text message is an ideal way to let everyone know what is going on back at base. In these recessionary times - group text messages sent out to thousands of reciepients make sure that members hear all the latest news from the horses mouth rather than through the grape vine (so to speak).
Number 3: Keeping the bar full
Howth Golf Club changed management a couple of years ago now and with the change they brought in our group text messaging service. The key to survival for established and new clubs alike is keeping the bar busy. Sending a text advertisement to members of special events and competitions means that the members don’t clutter up their post boxes with quickly binned flyers and at the same time keep up to speed with events in the club. The service literally boosts the till reciepts in the bar within hours.
Number 2: Feeling Hungry?
La Terratza restaurant in Castleknock have been using text messages as a means of promoting to past customers for a long time. In the last six months it has become a little bit quieter than Rudy would like however. Luckily he has collected patrons emails and phone numbers via competitions advertised on table settings and can now offer loyal customers great special deals. “It definitly works” Rudy recently told us over the phone while making another order.
Number 1: Retail Therapy
The single biggest advantage of text messagin promotion is the immediacy of the service. Having taken collection of a shed load of stock in the morning, proprietors and managers can fire out deals and invitations to customers by text within minutes. Noa noa, have just sent out a text invite to customers to their annual Christmas customers evening. There is simply no cheaper and more effective way of getting the troops in on short notice.
It is an early morning here in SmartNote. I’m off to present to PropertyTeam in the lovely Heritage Hotel in Killenard. There should be about 40 people there so I’m looking forward to showing them all how the system holds together.
Cashflow 101 is a boardgame designed by personal wealth guru Guy Kiyosaki. Guy has a definite view on how you should be looking at your personal finances - how to get rich and what to do with it when you get there. Speaking as someone who is still in the former category I can’t vouch for whether its true or not - but I do know that the game is a lot of fun and gives most more than a little to think about - especially if your working hard to get your hands on the filthy lucre and wonder if there is better way to go about it.
With this in mind I’m hosting a boardgame at the Olesya Wine bar on Exchequer st on the 3rd of October at 6.30. There are 10 spots available. If you would like to come along drop me a note. So far I’ve got the following attendees.
Its €25 at the door - which is going to support Fighting Blindness. At the moment there is a fair old technology bias to the group so don’t be afraid to try and break that up.
I was at a BNI Meeting yesterday where I saw a very interesting presentation from Gerry Kidd of Streetlink Couriers. I have heard nothing but good reports about Gerry. His company has a great reputation for reliability. It perhaps wasn’t a massive supprise to find out that Gerry had been looking at ways to streamline his business further using technology. He wanted to do this on two fronts. The first was for his account customers - allowing them to book couriers online rather than calling into the office. The potential pay off here could be huge in terms or ROI. If Gerry could reduce the number of staff answering the phones, or increase volume without taking on more staff, it would make a massive difference to his bottom line.
The second foray into the online world was with www.onceoffdeliveries.ie. Once off deliveries is something that isn’t usual fair for Streetlink. It can be awkward to collect payment and there is generally more hassle associated with them. There are however plenty of people who don’t use a courier regularly enough to have an account but still need to get stuff from A to B. The online service allows people to get an up front quote for a once off delivery and pay there and then by credit card online. It allows streetlink to take on jobs with payment up front - and because of the once off nature of the service - they can charge a premium.
It was fascinating to see the two approaches compared. The former had great potential for reducing cost and increasing volume. The latter would see to be some ‘icing on the cake’. In reality - the onceoffdeliveries.ie site has turned out to be the bigger success. His existing customers had become used to dealing with account handlers over the phone. There was also the extra reassurance of confirming the delivery by voice which the web seemed to lack for some. Several existing customers at the meeting expressed a similar worry about ordering online. Maybe these people were just on the wrong side of the bebo generation but there was a definte point to what they were saying - despite the fact you could also track your order online.
While the account system has increased the amount of volume, it hasn’t reduced staffing requirements. On the other hand - Gerry gets cash up front - at a premium - for once off jobs that he never would have never had before. A little online google advertising has lead to a turnover of €500 a week. Better still, he has opened up the service to two other courier companies and receives commission for every job they pick up from the system. In this way he has managed to scale his business beyond his existing capacity. This new online income is also independent of his real-world activities. It’s a system that could be maintained from anywhere in the world - or indeed operated anywhere in the world. The cost of the system was €8,000 and with a turnover of €20,000 per annum, it won’t take long to turn a profit. This has all been without any concerted marketing of the system. Gerry is currenlty looking for an overnight courier to extend the range of the service available.
If you thought the weather has been somewhat sub-par over the past couple of weeks - I couldn’t agree more. The unseasonable rain has had more than a few unexpected repurcussions for us - included a day where our website was unavailable. After some digging around - we discovered that this was because the power-sub station at our data-centre had been flooded. We thought we had a pretty rock-solid solution available to us - but it goes to show that you can nver have enough in the way of back ups. With that in mind, a raft of improvements to how our service is run including an expanded customer support / feedback portal have been brought forward. SmartNote customers can now log any techincal queries online and have an operative attend to the issue. We are also investing further in our hosting facilities and are currently sourcing a fallback location for emergency situations.
If you have been effected by our outage - and if I haven’t already called you personally - please accept our apologies and be assured that it has helped us to refocus on the core platform - stenghtening our offering further.
Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of 37signals and have been using their products for a while now. The simplest but one of the most useful - is the TADA list. It allows you to create simple todo lists. While working on a project, we have been using it to keep track of things to be done.
Using the SmartNote SMS -> RSS feature has allowed us to have up to the minute updates on which tasks are being updated as they go. Sign up now if you would like to give it a whirl.
I was happy to address my BNI Chapter with an extended presentation on SmartNote and the type of customers we are looking for. In short - I encouraged the group to ask people they deal with to ‘text me the details’. Texting customers details is a great customer service measure and one that many of our customers are getting kudos for. At the end of the presentation I received an unexpected testimonial. Aidan Kerin of Connolly Gaw told a little story about how he generated €20,000 worth of sales commission by simply texting his existing customers about ways he could offer to reinvest their SSIA’s.
Performance Upgrades
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The volume of messages flowing through the SmartNote platform has dramatically increased over the past couple of months. With greater volumes - it has been necessary to ramp up our capacity and fallback solutions. We have implemented a number of software and hardware upgrades recently to ensure quality of service in delivery.
According to SMS Text news and Comreg we seem to prefer to text rather than talk here in Ireland.
The ComReg report, entitled ComReg Trends Survey Wave1, found that the average mobile user make five calls a day but sends seven text messages. Unsurprisingly, younger users are more prone to sending texts with the report finding that those in the 15-24 age group were the most prolific senders of text messages, averaging over eight per day. Men appear to be more talkative than women, based on the survey’s findings, as their average of six voice calls per day is higher than their female counterparts.
For membership organisations, keeping people up to date is something that used to involve paper-cuts and trips to the post office. Now you can do it all from the comfort of your office chair. The IMO are the latest such member organisation to sign up to SmartNote for keeping members better informed. After previously using a competitive offering and finding the quality of delivery to be lacking, we are now happy to welcome them onboard as customers.
Poor customer service isn’t something that is limited to Dublin - as a recent trip to Madrid proved - but it is certainly a hot topic. If you are running a business, the sheer volume of work to be done can squeeze out some of the basics. Even here at SmartNote - I should be the first to admit that we can do more to look after the people who are putting dinner on the table. A couple of our clients who inspire me to look at how we can provide better customer service. Of course- I get to see how they do this using text messaging - so I thought I deliver some tips for better customer service using text messaging.
Before I do though - its worth mentioning that the immediate association many people have with text messages is unwanted or nuisance messages. If you have had one of these -you might want to check out where they have come from. Messages from SmartNote have a note at the end indicating where they have come - so you can be sure that if you do receive a nuisance message from a SmartNote client - we can move quickly to rectify the situation.
So lets get on with some best practice examples of how to use texting for better customer service.
- Gym assesments: Ever joined a gym, signed up for an assesment and wandered off into the great blue yonder never to let a sweat band mop your brow again? Well gyms in Dublin are using SmatNote to remind clients when they are due to revisit their gym assesment. Making groups of people, or scheduling messages into the future makes it easy for staff to schedule a follow up text at the time the initial consultantion takes place.
- Accocuntancy Firms: From the very start, some of our accountancy clients have been delighting those attending meetings at the office by sending out an appointment reminder. Ever time I meet up the the principal partner, he tells me what a good first impression the reminder text makes on his clients. It also reduces the number of missed appointments. We also have estate agents, holistic healing centers and personal trainors.
- Insurance companies: following up an insurance quote over the phone, by sending through a confirmation of the details by text is a super-handy way of making sure prospective clients have your details to hand. It makes it easier for clients to get back in touch.
Before I started this post - I actually didn’t realise how many ways there were to improve customer service by text. I think I will have to reserve some more tips for a future post.
