Shopping instead of talking: how to establish communication between the company and the client
Everything is changing dynamically and quickly: the world, people, forms of communication. With the development of technology, the channels for obtaining information, the users themselves and the means of communication are changing. Many companies are sure that they keep up with the times, but continue to use long e-mail correspondence in their work. Today’s client is not ready to wait, he wants an answer right here and now. In our work, we notice that it is more convenient for a client to ask an interesting question by writing to the company’s Facebook page, than by e-mailing her manager or calling the dispatcher. The company no longer has 24 hours to respond to a request, whether it be a letter or a commercial offer. Maximum now we have 24 minutes.
Some businessmen use new communication channels to spread spam. I am sure that you have repeatedly received spam emails from taxi services or various promotions not only via sms, but also via viber. Other representatives of the domestic business, mainly start-ups, tracking global trends, began to indicate for feedback Viber, Skype, WhatsApp.
I hope you learned the popular online messengers, but did not see unfamiliar words. The success story of these applications began with the development of an ICQ instant messenger by Israeli schoolchildren in 1996. Gradually evolving, thanks to the Jimm application in 2004, ICQ moved to mobile phones. Since 2010, social networks and Skype are gaining popularity, winning the hearts of users. In 2009, an immigrant from Ukraine living in California, Jan Kum, with his invention of WhatsApp, killed ICQ. In just two years, the application has become the most popular in the American App Store.
Viber is actively developing and gaining popularity, which poses a serious threat to Skype. A total of 516 million people are registered with Viber. And this is only 5 years from the start and without much investment in advertising. The number of users is constantly increasing and will soon reach the audience of users of the Skype service, which has existed since 2003
It should be noted that in the Asian market almost no one uses Skype. Leading positions were taken by local analogues – Line and WeChat. For two, they have over 650 million users, and they cover only China, Japan and South Korea, where every resident has a smartphone and due to the high penetration of the mobile Internet, such applications are very popular. Messengers are much more convenient than email and social networks. The numbers speak for themselves – out of 591 million Chinese Internet users, more than 460 million use the Internet through their mobile devices. The dynamic lifestyle and tight schedule of study and work of young Chinese forces them to combine online chatting with other activities. In a cafe, in parks, in public transport, each Chinese firmly holds a smartphone with an application for online communication open on it. Each country has its own leader among instant messengers: WeChat – in China, in Japan – Line, in South Korea – KakoTalk . There are also free messaging services of Canadian and Israeli origin.
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We live in an era when a smartphone has become a tool for shopping instead of talking. Indeed, in some messengers besides the function of communication, there is an opportunity to make purchases. In WeChat, you can register paid accounts of companies and advertise your products to users, as well as sell with the help of the TenPay payment system. Line Messenger launched Line Mall online stores in Japan and Line Flash Sales in Thailand in December 2013. In Line Flash Sales you can buy products of several brands, discount coupons in grocery stores and Line branded goods. More than 5.5 million users have joined the service. The Line Mall service allows companies to place their products and sell them online to messenger users. All payment transactions are carried out through its own Line system.
New e-commerce business models are being developed and new types of services are being created, and all this is due to the user’s ability to make purchases and order services from anywhere in the world at any time convenient for him.
I was inspired to write this mini-review by a story about the daily life of our Chinese office. The next generation of users will find it hard to imagine how we lived without WeChat before. Probably, as difficult as it is now difficult for us to imagine life without the Internet and smartphones.
