Media-Insert Communications

How to Power Mobile Commerce with Unique Data-driven Insights

The Covid-19 pandemic created a seismic shift in shopping habits in favour of e-commerce and m-commerce – buying retail goods and services online to the tune of more than $4.9 trillion USD worldwide. Daniela Coppola writes in her ‘E-commerce worldwide - statistics & facts’ report for Statista of 23rd February 2022 that e-commerce has therefore “become an indispensable part of the global retail framework.”

Retail has seen a significant industrial transformation since the mid-1990s with the advent of the internet, and since then the industry has continued become increasingly digitalised in line with modern life, whereby most worldwide consumer transactions are completed either online or by using digital forms of payments at the expense of cash.

Coppola reveals: “The number of digital buyers keeps climbing every year. In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.” This upward trend is expected to continue unabated, with e-commerce forecast to reach 24.5% market share of total global retail sales by 2025.

Bango (AIM: BGO, OTCQX: BGOPF) – a company that is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and a provider of unique purchase behaviour technology – says the market is growing at a rate of at least 15% per year, and so the overall macro trend is that people are spending more money online. From a market perspective, many sectors have seen market growth. A key area is the packaging of content in the form of subscriptions, such as gaming. “Where people might have once bought games on a case by case basis, they are now paying for subscriptions e.g. Xbox Game Pass,” says Anil Malhotra, CMO and Co-Founder of Bango.

Power mobile commerce insights, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Author: Graham Jarvis. Published in June 2022. 

 

Changing Payments: Growing Mobile Commerce Opportunities Post-pandemic

During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, ecommerce has accelerated right across the globe – to the extent that Econsultancy.com believes it’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. This is particularly since consumers shopped with increased frequency online out of necessity, writes Graham Jarvis.

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Published by Telemedia Online on 27th June 2022. 

How to overcome the Insurance Industry’s main challenges

Spixii examines how to address the main challenges for insurance businesses to deliver better customer experiences, increased customer loyalty, greater process and operational efficiency, and greater profitability to gain a competitive advantage with Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

To become competitive, to attract and retain customers, insurance businesses have to do more to address customer pain points. With conversational self-serve technology insurers can address them in sales, customer service, and claims.

From a business intelligence perspective, they are primarily about the sharing of information with the insurer via, for example, email. Customers are also frustrated by long waiting times, and by the quality or speed of an insurer’s response to their queries. As customer calls, or messages increase, customer waiting, and insurer response times can often get worse – leading to a poor customer experience.

One answer is to use technology to implement a SaaS platform for insurance that enables self-serve and CPA. It is also important to ensure that not too many questions are asked of the customer, and to make sure that the processes aren’t too long, complex, and arduous. Insurers need to, for example, offer a quote in a way that informs each customer according to their needs to enable them to make the right decision and this necessitates showing the right information to each customer. This approach is aligned with the Financial Conduct Authority's guidelines.

Providing the right information can often be complex because filling in forms can be confusing. For example, a customer may not understand a term. “So, it’s important to have additional support available to enable the customer or prospect to ask questions and to chat with a human being,” advises Million - – CEO and Co-Founder of Spixii.

Filling in forms can create a fractured experience when it leads to a customer making a phone call, or to starting a conversation in a web live chat, and then to that customer being stuck on the phone or waiting for a live chat for clarification. He therefore suggests that the ability to self-serve, “using a chatbot, can help to educate the customer and to make the decision to buy a product, or resolve a query immediately, in a seamless experience and with confidence.”

Overcome the insurance industry's main challenges, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Pubished circa June/July 2022. 

How to unlock self-serve through Conversational Process Automation

To avoid any loss, automation needs to better serve the insurance customer and not become a barrier to communication with the insurance provider or broker. Done well, automation can be utilised to channel customers to the right place. Done badly, as can happen with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers can wait 20 or more minutes to then be connected with someone who’s not the expert they need to speak with, and so they end up being transferred to another person. Being pushed from pillar to post and having to wait on the phone for too long creates a bad experience.

To prevent this from happening it’s vital to set the level of expectations by asking customers the right questions, and make sure their waiting times are significantly reduced. They want to gain a quick resolution to their issues, whether that be through buying an insurance product or talking to someone to resolve a problem with their insurance policy. Customers want to be able to quickly and immediately access claims updates, and they want to find the answers to their questions.

Renaud Million - CEO and Founder of Spixii - says they will use other channels if their experience through one particular channel, such as IVR or even a chatbot is not good. At worst, they will jump ship to buy a competitor’s insurance products. To ensure this doesn’t happen, and to keep each customer happy, expectations have to be set appropriately.

At the end of the conversation, to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained and to allow for continuing improvements, the conversation should end with the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to others?” By setting expectations, and by connecting, even the approach behind IVR can be empowered to do what the end user wants to do.

Unlock 'self-serve' through Conversational Process Automation, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa: June/July 2022. 

Customer-first: Exploring the Self-service Technology Landscape

Like most industries, digital transformation is changing insurance. Journalist, Polly Jean Harrison, writing for the Fintech Times on 5^th May 2022 about ‘The Top Tech Trends Transforming The Insurance Industry’ therefore claims it has never before more ripe for disruption than it has today. The charge for change is being led by Insurtech startups who lead with technology-first approaches. Arguably though, they need to lead with customer-first approaches by initially understanding how the implementation of technology impacts on customer experiences of insurance brands. 

This industry shake-up is nevertheless expected to change the industry forever. The start-ups are working on augmenting legacy systems, increasing robotic process automation (RPA), low-code/no-code developments, tailored digital products, and then there is Spixii’s ability to offer Conversational Process Automation (CPA) and its expertise in enhanced Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

Harrison writes: “Insurance companies are in a “digital race” as they rush to innovate to support better customer experiences. Agility has become a baseline to mark competitiveness in today’s insurance space...[insurance] companies are exploring AI-enabled tools to automate estimation and inspection. One instance of this is the use of telematics to offer greater levels of contextual information to aid smoother, faster, and more comprehensive claims settlements.”

“More and more agents and brokers are turning to digital tools; at the same time, customer demand is skyrocketing with the emergence of self-service digital channels. A McKinsey survey conducted in 2020 of European insurance executives, revealed that 89 per cent of respondents expect a significant acceleration in digitisation, and most also foresee a further shift in channel mix.”

She argues that the fully tech-enabled insurers of the near-future will be unrecognisable when compared to today’s organisations: “The fact of the matter is that inefficient, manual processes have to go. Paper-pushing may have been the norm in the insurance industries for centuries, but this is no longer feasible. These archaic channels cannot be seen as necessary evils anymore, with digital solutions right here under our noses and being normalised more and more each day.”

Explore more, read the complete article on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa June/July 2022. 

E-book: How to enable true self-serve in insurance

Before any discussion about how insurers can enable true ‘self-serve’ in the insurance industry, it’s imperative to define what it means. It’s about improving the customer experience and reducing operating costs in insurance by allowing the end user, the prospect of an insurance company, to be able to perform a task using self-service tools. The same applies to brokers. To increase their effectiveness and efficiencies they also need to have the right resources to better serve their clients.

Spixii CEO, Renaud Million, explains: “Having the ability to self-serve gives insurance customers the ability to complete a task online such as to get a quote, or to buy a policy, or to log a claim or to make amendments to the policy. All these tasks, if they couldn’t do them online, would be undertaken through the traditional channels of email or over the phone. Self-serve, self-service, offers the ability to perform tasks online whenever they want, and from whatever device they wish to use.”

Learn why 'self-serve' improved the customer experience, read the complete article. Download the E-Book to learn 'How to enable true self-serve in insurance'. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa June/July 2022. 

How to Position Yourself as a Thought Leader

Client expectations must be set before any agency can begin to write up a thought-leadership article. That’s because PR clients often want to push how great they are, and how fantastic their products are. Whilst they may be great, editors want to receive content that’s informative and which focuses more on the issues of the day and how to overcome them than on the sales pitch of any company or any individual. This principle applies to placing any kind of thought-leadership article – whether it’s about how to make the most of the blockchain, investing in crypto-currencies, securing the cloud, Wide Area Network (WAN) data acceleration, or about the latest consumer trends.

Discover more about how to position yourself as a thought leader, read the full article. 

Published by PRmoment on 10th September 2019. Client: Trudy Darwin Consulting. 

Media-Insert launches The Marketing Leadership Forum on Facebook

Following the removal of The Marketing Leaders' group on Facebook, for which no clear reason has yet been given by Facebook, and which Graham Jarvis legitimately set up on behalf of the online magazine and Community in July 2007 as Editor of The Marketing Leaders (and as a co-founder of the brand and as a principal officer of the Community), he has launched a re-branded version: The Marketing Leadership Forum.

No quarrel with Facebook

Graham has no quarrel with Facebook; this is in no way an attack on Facebook, which is an invaluable and recommended personal and business forum. Nevertheless, he believes that Facebook should consult the Creators of such Facebook groups as The Marketing Leaders before any action to remove any bonafide group (as it was) on the site is taken. This would ensure fairness, and it would prevent any groups from being deleted without reasonable cause or justification.

This would also ensure that any such action as that taken follows the established principles and processes of law, by allowing the Creators to counter any arguments for the closure of a particular Facebook group before it is undertaken. Graham recommends that the Creators should be given a period of notice to allow time for an appeal, or for any requested action to be completed.

A more detailed explanation of why the site was removed has been requested, but it is suspected that it might have something to do with the, as yet, unresolved dispute over the ownership of The Marketing Leaders' intellectual property. He remains hopeful that the issues will soon be resolved between all of the co-founders: David Hood (Community Director and VP of Strategy and Futures - the former Chair of CIMTech, Paul Codd MacDonald of Bipedal Ltd (the Publisher), and himself.

Dedicated to the Marketing Cause

Graham has worked tirelessly for the Chartered Institute of Marketing's Technology group since 2001, becoming Editor of its online newsletter in 2003. This became The Marketing Leaders in February 2006 when the group left the CIM. He has since then continued his role as Editor. Although he has not as such 'moved on' from this role, Graham is now exploring new opportunities with David Hood, other publications and his clients in general. He is therefore optimistic about the New Year of 2008. 

Join The Marketing Leadership Forum

The Marketing Leadership Forum is hosted on Facebook and it was created by Graham. The Forum is totally independent of The Marketing Leaders and of Bipedal Ltd. It is described as being, "A professional discussion forum for people who feel that they are leaders in marketing. It's particularly for those with an interest in the effective strategic implementation of information communications technology for marketing. Posts are welcomed about both B2B and B2C marketing."

If you are a leader in marketing, a thought-leader or industry recognised practitioner, please request to join the group by visiting: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6758967207. Graham welcomes B2B and B2C professional marketers, and he hopes that Facebook will also support The Marketing Leadership Forum. Social networking is one of the areas he is writing about on behalf of some of his clients, particularly for two popular, highly acclaimed and well established online US marketing magazines.

[email protected] - address currently not working.

Please therefore email me at [email protected]. You can also reach me on +44 776 682 3644.