Brooklyn, New York, February 9, 2006 -- The wireless industry has long struggled with the costs associated with providing good customer care and 611 service. By best industry estimates, the average cost of an inbound call to a customer care center hovers around $7 . To put that number in financial context, more than one-half (54%) of wireless users surveyed for J.D. Power & Associates for its 2005 Wireless Customer Care Performance Study say they have contacted the customer service department for assistance within the past year. With over 202 million subscribers to support, carrier resources are strained at both ends of the user experience - network performance and customer care.
The challenge of providing an acceptable level of customer support to an ever growing number of wireless users has not gone unnoticed by customers at the point of sale. According to the same J.D. Power & Associates study, the number of users who say they were dissatisfied with their visits to a wireless retail store has gone up 46 percent since 2004. Twenty percent of those say they will be "probably" or "definitely" switching carriers within a year as a direct result of that experience.
All this is leading to an inevitable shake-up in the distribution chain, as carriers look to detangle their relationships with those independent retailers not pulling their weight at the point of sale in favor of company owned stores. So where does that lead the independent wireless retailer? "We tell our agents its 'metrics or die!" says David Simkins, president of Mobile Communications Plus, a Master Agent in the New York area with a network of 125 dealers with over 200 retail locations.
"The ones that embrace the concept of and proactively invest in customer service automation tools are the ones that will find themselves still in business tomorrow," says Simkins. "It's critical that they have the tools at the point of sale to capture the information they need and have the scripts and windows there for them to walk the customer through a satisfactory buying experience."
Simkins recommends the Wireless Standard POS solution from
B2B Soft to his agent retailers. "We thoroughly researched the Top 10 POS solutions out there so we could help our agents invest in the right automation tools for their business going forward. The B2B product is one of the best we've seen."
Wireless Standard POS is the base product of
B2B Soft, built on a commercially secure and stable client-server model and created on the most advanced and reliable platform available - Microsoft's .NET enterprise-level technology. Some of the Wireless Standard POS features include: serialized inventory control, employee management, online report distribution system, carrier interface and commission tracking just to name a few. By providing the information matrices needed to take control of the sale, retailers can turn a wireless subscriber into a customer for life.
About B2B Soft
B2B Soft is a business-to-business software solutions company, specializing in applications for the wireless/cellular retail industry. More information about the company can be found at
http://www.b2bsoft.com/.