Johannesburg, 24 Jun 2015
Today, customers are highly informed and brand conscious. Unlike a few years ago where brands influenced customers, now customers influence brands through engagement. Customer engagement has become far quicker and accessible through voice and mobile technologies.
Customer-focused brands are leveraging affordable and interactive channels by structuring their marketing campaigns around different mobile engagement solutions.
Tony Smith, CEO of Oxygen8 SA, a global provider of integrated mobile solutions, said: "With the tools to help enhance and improve interactions with customers, companies can fully embrace the power of mobile as a multi-channel tool, ensuring personal and meaningful engagement every time. This is achieved by installing effective mobile engagement solutions."
Oxygen8 recently introduced its mobile engagement solution, Engage, to the South African market, following the successful launch in the UK and Europe. This cloud-based mobile engagement platform creates interactive services and marketing campaigns.
Engage is an innovative and measurable solution that offers immediacy and targets individuals through customised messaging. Mobile campaigns are quickly and easily created by using a combination of features, such as SMS messaging, campaign calendar, mobile page builder, contact management, mobile surveys, SMS short codes, SMS keywords and inbounds numbers and reporting.
According to Smith, Engage has been successfully installed in several enterprise companies internationally, such as Aer Lingus, a low-cost Irish airline.
Founded in 1936 by the Irish government, Aer Lingus focuses on cost control, using the latest technology to keep expenses low while maintaining high levels of customer service. The Web site was a primary distribution channel of the airline and a majority of bookings were made online. However, it was difficult to develop close customer relationships and deliver differentiated customer service. In the event of a known flight delay or cancellation, the airline couldn't rely on customers reading and acting on e-mails, especially if contact needed to be made at unsociable hours or when passengers were away. Using call centre agents to let people know individually was expensive and time-consuming.
To counter this problem, Aer Lingus used Engage's text-based solution, SMS Gateway, which allows the airline to reliably contact customers promptly and at short notice with changes to schedules and other valuable service information.
The solution, which is connected to the central Aer Lingus online booking system, provides opt-in passenger lists with timely SMS alerts on any flight delays, cancellations or service updates. Oxygen8 SMS Gateway proved instrumental in keeping customers and staff informed.
"As with Aer Lingus, our mobile engagement solution has significantly improved customer engagement in other large international brands, such as Hermes, Paddy Power and Unilever, to name a few. Engage enabled these companies to reach their goal of building brand loyalty and recognition through the relevant communication channels," adds Smith.
Informed customers know their preferred channels of communication. According to Smith, it's a company's responsibility to ensure it is communicating with its customers correctly. "A good campaign can be ruined by using the wrong communication channel, as it can immediately annoy the customer and start the campaign on the wrong footing," says Smith.
Engage has another powerful feature - mobile page builder, which can create a mobile survey that allows companies to capture vital data on how customers view the company, what products they would like to see, how they find the customer service, what channels of communication they prefer, among many other options. Armed with these facts, companies will know if they are engaging correctly with their customers, or if they need to implement changes.
"Having had success abroad with the Engage solution and then launching it in South Africa, we have experienced a quick uptake from our local customer base in the mining, media, leisure, resources and manufacturing sectors," concludes Smith.
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