By Natalie Dorothy Scopelitis, Director Of Digital Transformation, Huawei Software

In an age where consumers want fast and easy access to products and mobile subscription has shifted from being a commodity to an essential daily tool, it is important to remove the barriers to easy distribution and sales at the consumer’s doorstep.

How easy is it to subscribe customers to your network? And how easy is it to take the product to the customer?

As the telecommunications services market matures and more and more households keep multiple connections and devices, consumers are becoming more demanding about their connectivity and how they access it. eCommerce and journeys such as ‘click and collect’ have also enabled consumers to find the best prices from the comfort of their home and have the ability touch and see the device in a nearby shop that same day before taking it home.

However reaching consumers where geography and transport links are making the population distributed is a real challenge, particularly in rural areas, and in an era of Amazon prime and instant service, keeping customers satisfied with fast delivery and shorter lead times means making changes to your sales and distribution models. How easy is it for your staff and your partners to actually sell and activate your product? Are you finding that customer queuing time in your shops is too long.

Due to shifting market needs, Huawei has developed a solution which makes it both simple and fast to register customers and activate pre-paid and post-paid subscriptions within the space of a few minutes. There is no dependency on a physical store location, or any infrastructure or training required in order to deliver a SIM card to a customer anywhere: a kiosk on the street, a shopping centre, a vending machine in the town square, or even at the customer’s home. The mobile app, installable on any smartphone, enables staff to register new customers quickly; registrations and top ups take anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes compared to some 30+ minute waiting times seen in some EU operator stores for pre and post paid registrations.

So how does Dealer Agent Cloud work?

The Dealer agent app is the front end of a cloud based service which invokes standard processes such as customer registration and activation, top-up, and so on. The UI is a flow of intuitive and simple screens which enable the dealer or employee to register customers and SIM cards within seconds. This is done through identification document scanning (e.g. passports) and barcode scanning of the products which are purchased. The scanned data is auto-populated into the order reducing data entry time and minimising manual errors in the order. This has a knock on effect on order breakage reduction through improving data accuracy, which in turn directly links to NPS improvement. As the process is simple and fast, it also means that the customer doesn’t have to wait to purchase and use their product and queuing time in the shops is drastically reduced.

Dealer agent cloud also offers further interesting security features, it allows fingerprint scanning which the customer can then use to provide authorisation for various activities on their account, e.g. upgrades. Upon contract signing the customer uses digital signature on the mobile device itself, this not only eliminates paperwork and paper contracts but also serves for customer authentication purposes in later stages of the customer lifecycle.

Finally the customer can use their SIM card immediately as the app will register the SIM number to the network instantly at completion of the order. Of course this can be achieved either through integration or by using pre-enabled SIM cards. Both scenarios provide the customer with excellent service through instant activation.

As per most Saas services, the dealer agent cloud offers the advantages of cloud based systems in that it is cost efficient compared to on premise models, it utilises standardized APIs for integration which if not already exposed by the existing backend, can be extended quickly. As such it can be rolled out instantly to employees and dealers through self-installation directly onto their phones.

What does this mean for sales and distribution?

As the app can be installed on any mobile device, this removes the need for costly hardware, laptops/PCs for performing customer registrations but also for printing terminals as the contracts are signed digitally and payments are made electronically, without the need for paper. Due to the lack of bulky hardware, this also removes the need for a static location. The sales person could literally be mobile, and take sales to the customer wherever they may be. There is geographical flexibility as the sales are not bound to a physical store anymore. As such, this capability can support any host of physical presence, kiosks, mobile sales, vending machines and so forth. In a large number of growth countries the volume of kiosks and vending machines actually exceeds the number of shops. The UI itself due to its simplicity and intuitiveness enables faster sales, reducing waiting time for customers and thereby increasing NPS.

If your revenue opportunity from dealers is high but you just can’t seem to tap into it, improving your user experience can make a material difference to your bottom line.

Through speaking to a number of European dealers we found that they will often avoid selling products of operators whose systems are too complicated to register customers and create orders. As a result some operators were missing out on thousands of orders each week. Therefore simpler user experience has a direct impact on revenue. The dealer app front end offers a simple flow of screens, and by using scanning and auto-population of data, it means that the user journey can be completed simply, quickly and error free.

Boost your ability to scale through faster registration of customer orders, scalability is also introduced where the same volume of staff can handle increased volumes of orders. Promotions and device launch dates where operators see order surges (e.g. Black Friday) become a lot easier to respond to without losing out on sales due to slowness and limited staff. Through the app’s intuitiveness there is also no need for training, apart from saving on training cost, you will also be able to onboard new staff and partners much faster with fewer errors on startup, which becomes particularly important when scaling staff at peak periods.

In summary, see how you can strengthen your ability to sell through your shop network and through your dealers and partners, boost your revenue opportunities and take sales to your customers without location restrictions. Request a free trial at the Dealer Agent Cloud website.