Business Owner Roundup: How Does Your Company Serve Customers on Mobile Devices?

Mobile can no longer be viewed as an alternative way that people engage with your business. Today, it’s the main way. In fact, U.S. smartphone users now spend more than 3 hours per day on their phones—an amount of time that’s only expected to keep growing.

We asked business owners how they’re using mobile to better engage and serve customers; here’s how they responded:

Optimizing site for mobile visitors

We have taken significant steps toward improving our mobile site and app over the past year to make it easy and convenient for mobile users to get in touch and find information on various tax-related questions they have. We want them to be able to get in touch with someone from our team almost immediately, so we have implanted things like chatbots, contact forms, phone numbers, and follow-up email campaigns—all in an easy-to-find-and-read format for mobile visitors. Additionally, improving our mobile site has given a little boost to our SEO efforts, which is an additional benefit of optimizing for mobile.

—Jacob Dayan, co-founder and CEO, Community Tax, Chicago

Texting customers and prospects

People today are overwhelmingly busy, and texting has become a preferred means of communication. We implemented a third-party texting application into our customer relationship management (CRM) system as a means to automate our first response to new leads that either call or submit their information through our website form. We discovered that it is easier to prospect using texting automation, and we are much more likely to get the customer on the phone by scheduling a time via text message first. It is also more efficient for our sales process because we don’t have to constantly try to reach out to leads via a phone call just to touch base.

—Jonathan Faccone, founder, Halo Homebuyers, Bridgewater, New Jersey

Creating a mobile app to serve clients

We’re a digital marketing company that provides search-optimization services. One of the biggest issues clients have with SEO is keeping track of what is being done for their account month after month. We solved this problem by introducing a mobile app. The app keeps clients updated on everything we’re doing for their website, as well as provides live stats of every SEO metric imaginable. The app also helps us roll out new promotions and features that we’re constantly adding to our business. It has helped build trust and transparency between our clients and our brand and has become a central part of our client experience.

—Almas Younis, founder, Hyper-Loop Digital Marketing & SEO, Baltimore

Answering customer questions using WhatsApp

With a limited budget to invest for business software that will support my shop, we use the free mobile messaging app WhatsApp to provide real-time customer service. The good thing about WhatsApp is that it supports rich media. So, besides being able to answer customer queries right away, we also have the liberty to respond in a variety of ways, such as using audio and video responses. This is a huge deal for small businesses like mine as it provides us a way to communicate with our customers for free.

—Daniel Carter, founder, Zippy Electrics, Los Angeles

Using mobile-based project management software

As a consulting firm, we use a project management software called ClickUp that works effectively on mobile to make project management easier—allowing us to access the software and find customer information anywhere, anytime, which especially comes in handy when we’re out in the field. But this also puts us at an advantage over our competitors when it comes to serving customers, because we can update our clients with project status in real time. We can also share with them our project management reports that they can access on mobile and use it more efficiently to collaborate with them.

—Michael Hammelburger, CEO, The Bottom Line Group, Baltimore

How does your company use mobile to engage customers? Let us know in the comments section below.