Jul 25, 2017

3 Ways to Create a Great Experience for your Prepaid Customers

Stacy Hamer

Delivering a consistently great customer experience is a challenge for any retailer. If you’re a prepaid wireless dealer, you’ve got a unique set of challenges when it comes to attracting customers and keeping them coming back. Post-paid dealers benefit from the contract their customers sign with them. The contract can give them a leg up on building loyalty and creating a connection with the consumer that keeps them coming back. However, the prepaid market continues to grow. According to Statista, from 2008 to 2016, the number of prepaid customers in the United States has more than doubled from 19 million to over 50 million. This presents a tremendous opportunity for those who understand what drives a prepaid customer.

Prepaid customers want a no-nonsense, affordable plan, and they also want to get in and out of the store quickly. So how do you provide efficiency for your customer while also maximizing their visit from a revenue perspective?

Unleash your POS: It’s time to go mobile

Let’s start with an easy win. Your customers have busy lives and value convenience. The last thing they want to do is stand in line. Serve your customer anywhere in the store by investing in a mobile POS. Do you frequently have a store packed full of customers simply waiting to pay their bill? Serve them quickly and efficiently with your mobile-POS equipped associates and leave the one-on-one time to the associates doing activations or upgrades. Simple, right? But beyond the obvious benefits, arming your sales associates with a mobile POS gives them the opportunity to turn into rock star product experts and customer service extraordinaires. They’re no longer chained behind the counter and are free to serve customers hip-to-hip by viewing real-time data including inventory and customer profiles. Not having to leave your customer to go check stock or look up information gives sales reps the confidence to know they have all the answers they need to serve customers well right at their fingertips. 

Deliver with Drop ship: They ask for it, you’ve got it

Competition has increased for wireless dealers from all angles, whether it’s from another dealer down the street or the plethora of options consumers can now find online. It’s imperative that you look for ways to maximize the revenue opportunity of each customer who walks through the door. One way of doing this is by offering a drop ship service to your customers. Peg space is valuable, and with technology and devices changing constantly, it can be impossible to offer everything that your customer may be looking for. With a drop ship, that problem is completely solved for you (and your customer.) If someone walks in looking for a case for an iPhone 5s, you can make the sale… even though I can make a pretty safe bet that you no longer physically stock accessories for anything that old. Drop ship allows you to complement your physical stock with virtual stock made available through third-party suppliers that you then drop ship to your customer. Wary of bringing in high-end items? Offering virtual fulfillment ensures you never miss out on a sale and always delight your customers without the risk of carrying more product. Customers can benefit from your extended product line with help from your associates by ordering drop ship items through your POS, displaying them on a tablet (mobile POS), or you can take it up a notch by adding a touchscreen endless aisle kiosk to your store.  

Fix your repair service: Handle repair requests like a dream

Your customer’s phone is a precious item… when something goes wrong they want a quick and easy fix. If you’re a prepaid dealer, adding repair service is a great addition to your business – creating yet another revenue opportunity. And if you’re a repair shop, adding an endless aisle strategy as discussed above is a perfect fit for you as well (if I just smashed my phone, selling me on a new protective case is likely an easy opportunity.) Consumers are looking for a one-stop-shop when it comes to wireless service. So, whether you’re a prepaid dealer who offers repair services, or are a repair shop looking to grow your business, you need to ensure your POS is able to effectively track and manage service and repair requests to get your customer’s phone back in their hands quickly. It ties back to that whole convenience theme. Offering a repair service requires your POS to have functionality that doesn’t typically come standard with a regular retail POS. Look for a POS tailored to handling repairs that allows you to create custom fields and checklists for your reps to follow, link parts and materials to repair types, assign the status, technician, or employee to a service request, track the repair through all stages of the service, and open a new service request from the sales console. Having the right technology in place will help you serve your customers better and help keep you and your team sane when tracking the million moving pieces of your business.

So there you have it, three actions you can take to improve customer experience and grow your revenue. If you’re curious to learn more about the solutions iQmetrix offers to help you in any of these areas, visit our website and request a demo.

Mobile POS: www.iQmetrix.com/POS

Endless Aisle: www.iQmetrix.com/Dropship

Service & Repair: www.iQmetrix.com/Repair

Better yet, if you’re attending The Prepaid Expo in Las Vegas, come visit us at booth #122!

About author

Stacy Hamer

Stacy Hamer is Director of Professional Services at iQmetrix. Stacy oversees iQmetrix’s flagship product, RQ, a POS and retail management solution that powers 19,000+ wireless retailers and repair shops. With over 15 years of experience helping clients achieve incredible growth, Stacy has personally seen hundreds of businesses through the process of implementing best practices for strengthening their operations in a competitive wireless market.