// Opening channels delivers more than you'd expect
07.08.08
It is always interesting in business when you receive good old fashioned down-to-earth honest advice, born of experience and insight. Let's face it, it doesn't happen all that often. Well there's a phrase we knock about at Sponge Towers that seems to be receiving quite a lot of positive attention. It's something that points out that there is often more to mobile than meets the eye. This phrase that pays is when you open a channel, you open a channel. It emanates from the experiences we've had that somewhere between 1 and 5% of all the messages we receive are off message. But unlike some, we don't just throw these away, they are actually where a lot of the value of a campaign or application is derived.
The customers who want to have a conversation with your brand or service are most often the ones who you need to care about. They are the churners, the angry customers, or the loyal, the evangelisers and the up-sellable. When you receive inbound texts (as we have) to multi-choice answer quizzes that say Brand X, you suck, I'm switching to Brand Y, the last thing you want to do with this customer is send them back a syntax error. Bang. Your client just lost a customer. You wouldn't expect someone who walked into a shop to complain to get the door slammed in their face, and yet people do that all the time in mobile campaigns.
So here at Sponge, to blow the trumpet for a second, we've been doing this stuff long enough to know that your customers deserve better, so we believe in escalation, not just automation. In essence, what we're saying is look after your exceptions, and they will look after you, and what we try to do is look after those exceptions. If you're using someone else to manage your mobile campaigns, ask what they're doing with these messages. I hope for your customers' and consumers' sake they're not being thrown away.
