November 21, 2005

Cell Phone SMS as a Customer Service Tool

A tire service center in Europe uses SMS to communicate with their customers and schedule tire changes. What did I tell you? Technology is a TOOL - you can do with it what you want, but please, grow your business with it.

The press release reads that Vianor can now efficiently schedule the changes of tires on their customers' cars and provide customer services in real-time. Vianor sends a message with the proposed time slot to the customer's mobile phone. The customer can accept the time, request a new time or ask to be contacted. Already the solution has this autumn reduced the overload peaks, improved utilization of available capacity, saved costs and improved customer satisfaction. The solution works on all mobile phones independent of network in a user friendly and automatic way - no new software or configurations are required on the mobile phone.

Marketing manager Pekka Laihia from Vianor considers it a major challenge to manage the seasonal peak, when people change tires on their cars from summer to winter. Up to 40% of the annual turnover is related to a few weeks hectic work. It is crucial to schedule the changes of tyres and customer services efficiently. Interactive communication with the customers really makes the difference. With intelligent SMS services we can schedule the work smoothly and with the existing capacity we have been able to serve 10 to 15% more customers. This improves profitability, customer service and satisfaction directly.

Scheduling of customer services is an excellent example of how mobile messaging supports the development of business processes in an enterprise. We believe similar solutions will be widely used in the near future in many industries. The enterprises and organizations can immediately improve competitiveness and efficiency in their operations. User friendliness combined with security has been key issues, when developing the Intelligent SMS service. The service is based on the "One button principle" and it recognizes the user automatically without any need for passwords or codes. The service is so straight forward that it can be used without training or instructions, says BookIT President Jukka Salonen

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