Cosmetics Giant SMS Its Way To Profitability

The Short Message Service (SMS) is saving one cosmetics giant thousands of rands. SMSs were not developed with the commercial market in mind, but businesses are starting to realise that teenagers shouldn’t be the only ones who communicate cheaply. Avroy Shlain Cosmetics recently upgraded their ordering system to allow consumers to place orders via SMS rather than phoning the call centre.  This approach achieved three goals:

• Reduced of direct costs because SMSs are cheaper and shorter than phone calls and indirect call centre costs. 
• Time taken to log an order was greatly reduced as the information is sent directly to Avroy Shlain’s software system.
• Overall customer satisfaction improved as a result of the enhanced ordering process and resulted in better customer satisfaction.

Avroy Shlain is the largest direct selling cosmetic house in South Africa and is continuing to expand its distribution networks both nationally and internationally. As their production and channels expanded a need emerged for a guaranteed low cost channel to better handle the large volume of calls.  QBCon, a business solution developer, designed the system that translates the consumer’s SMS and automatically routes it to the correct recipient. This reduces the demand on the call centre and, in turn, eases the stress on Avroy Shlain’s distribution channel.

QBCon hopes that other large volume call centres will see the benefit and cost savings that a SMS service can provide. Gustav Piater, marketing director for QBCon says:”We believe there is a niche for a SMS service as it reduces transactional costs by reducing both the consumer and the supplier’s telephonic costs.”