Message Delivered

For retailers striving to build customer relationships using voice mail, e-mail and text messages, success may be determined by correctly identifying their customers’ preferred method of communication and the ability to personalize those messages.

Based on experience and research, SoundBite Communications has identified those two elements as being critical to successful interactions between retailers and shoppers in their multi-channel communications. And those elements have especially powerful implications in mobile communications.

“In today’s economic environment, with consumer spending flat or down, competition for consumer spending has intensified over the past year,” says Mark Friedman, chief marketing and business development officer for Bedford, Mass.-based SoundBite. “To break through to the consumer, it is absolutely critical to communicate with consumers in the way they prefer.”

With annual text-message volume now numbering in the billions and with thousands being sent every second, one-way messages from retailers “will not cut it in today’s environment,” he says. “It’s critical to have an interactive dialog with consumers. In the case of a special offer sent via text message, you have to have the ability to allow the consumer to respond: Ask if they want a coupon sent for that special offer or whether they want to make a purchase online. If the consumer then responds, ‘Want to purchase online,’ you’ve created a dialog and it’s that intimacy that drives loyalty and profitability.”

SoundBite recently introduced this capability for personalized text messages. The innovations are two-fold, and both are elements of the company’s SoundBite Engage program. The first is the SoundBite Dialog Engine, which enables fully automated, interactive text-messaging conversations using custom business logic. The second is the SoundBite Agent Text Portal, a refinement of the Dialog Engine that automatically allows customer support agents to interact with customers in real time using a web-based interface.

Benefits abound
“The beauty of text messaging is its ability to align with retailers’ key goals: increasing the average basket size, the frequency of store visits, brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, the ability to do surveys and quickly provide customers with the ability to respond to questions about their shopping experience,” Friedman says. “If the experience was great, bring them a special offer. If not, ask them to discuss it in whatever way they want to follow through.”

Companies utilizing text messaging also benefit from reduced telephony costs, increased agent productivity and an improved customer experience. Consumer benefits come in the form of greater convenience, not having to wait on hold and the retailer’s ability to archive customers’ text message history.

Both capabilities allow SoundBite’s clients to compile basic information about customer preferences and individual demographics. Friedman notes, for example, that loyalty programs can be important resources for a customer’s age, gender and geographic region.

The company boasts an extensive client list of department, grocery, automotive, discount, drug and consumer electronics chains. One SoundBite client, a top 20 U.S. retailer with more than 20 million members in its loyalty program, “wanted to increase the redemption rate for program points, so they were sending out e-mails and getting a 16 percent increase,” Friedman says. “But when they added voice messaging, they got a 31 percent increase.

“Another client did voice messaging and e-mail, and got a 52 percent increase. So the sum of the parts was greater than with one individual type of communication and also drove other incremental sales.”

SoundBite’s Preference Management solution captures consumers’ opt-in and opt-out preferences, as well as individual responses to a variety of communications, thus allowing retailers to make decisions about the communication choices they offer customers.

“Today’s consumer is bombarded with so many types of communication. To break through all that noise, an organization has to ensure that their communications are pro-active, but with intelligence,” Friedman says. “It has to be personalized and engaging, and allow the customer to interact.”