While employee liable programs offer a vast opportunity for growth, it is important to gain proper expectations of your program’s success by channel. Consideration should be given to the company’s size (are these employees centralized in a few locations or nationwide?), employee demographic (are these employees more likely to buy online or in a retail store?), wireless carrier status (does this company favor another carrier?), competitive offers (do other carriers offer a better discount?), etc. Analyzing these areas helps to create a healthy set of expectations and goals from each channel.

Creating an online store for your account – the Bluefish way

Once we have established that employees of your account are comfortable making buying decisions online, we can build a portal that meets their needs. As a Bluefish IL account, Sprint teams can be confident that their employee website at the least offers:

• - A user friendly buying path
• - The ability to quickly create custom promotions
• - Up-to-date pricing
• - A "buy now" incentive for online orders
• - Real time statistics
• - After hours help desk assistance and live chat

Advertising your employee liable website – the Bluefish way

"Brands that are setting the world on fire make people feel more confident about (and perhaps even more intelligent for) doing business with them. And one very visible signal a brand can send about its momentum is how consistently it advertises."(Business Week, May 15, 2009)

From years of experience, Bluefish understands first hand that the key to a successful IL program is based around consistent messaging and partnership. Here are a few tips that we have learned creates a solid base for any program.

• 1) Be Consistent! Strive for consistency with the Sprint brand. Secure an easy to remember Sprint url. Making a url too long or complicated will make it much more difficult for employees to remember.
• 2) Be Consistent! Only use one url for advertising purposes. When embarking on a marketing campaign, consistency is key and promoting more than one url will confuse your target audience and dilute the efficacy of the brand you are trying to build.
• 3) Be Consistent! In order to leverage Sprint’s national advertising investment, all messaging, layout and look should mirror the overall identity of Sprint’s current campaigns.
• 4) Be Consistent! Remain reliable throughout the year. It takes time to build a solid relationship with customers especially when asking them to buy online with a 1-2 year commitment. The window of opportunity to reach a customer that is ready to buy today is small. Therefore, look for ways to be in an easy to find location so employees will know where to find you when they are ready. Then capitalize on several other opportunities throughout the year to remind employees why they will want to switch to Sprint when their contract expires.

Lastly, remember that the most successful employee programs are ones that are embraced by the company. An exceedingly successful, employee embracing IL program can only thrive if it has genuine and sustained employer support.

Shopping for a new mobile device can be an overwhelming experience. Not only do customers have several carrier options for their personal and family needs, but they have a limitless number of places to shop both in store and online.

So why buy online? As a matter of fact, many people don’t. Less than 2% of shoppers who visit websites make a purchase. However, there are many benefits for doing so. The major perks of purchasing a wireless device online are the exclusive incentives along with unparalleled convenience.

Bluefish understands these buying habits and understands that there is still a market for online mobile purchases when customers are given the proper tools. This is why we continue to invest IT development time and money in our IL websites as they are our face to the customer. Over the last year and half, our IL order portals have undergone a series of improvements to increase overall use, enhance the overall shopping experience and accelerate sales conversions.

Round 1 - Feedback and expertise.

As our IL department and customer base continued to expand in 2008, we realized the importance of listening to maximize our online sales potential. We talked to our customers, Bluefish sales specialists and Sprint account teams to gather their portal feedback. We wanted to stay competitive and user friendly. The information we gathered led us to partnering with a design firm with expertise in user-centered design. Together we redesigned our IL landing page to provide our customers a clean, non-intimidating entry point to their specific employee program options.

Round 2 - Customer shopping experience

Naturally, the next step toward success was to invest in the entire shopping experience from beginning to end. Our goal was to take the complicated process of purchasing a new wireless plan from daunting to delightful. To help achieve that goal, we invested in a third party research company with experience in enhancing online retail sales. Based on the shopping patterns of wireless consumers, we implemented several functional tools:

• - Device-driven plans/features – Phones, plans and features are now tied together so that a user only sees appropriate options during the ordering process. For example, when a customer chooses a Blackberry device, only plans and features associated with Blackberries are available.
• - Guided buying – customers who are unsure of what device they need can choose to be asked 3-5 simple lifestyle questions about their wireless needs. Based on their answers, the site provides both device and plan recommendations unique to that customer.
• - Interactive customer review – Much like you see reviews on Amazon.com, customers can post feedback on the device they purchased from Bluefish and view reviews from other employees within their own company.

In addition to the original tools like live chat that we already had in place, the investments we have made to our IL website have made a significant difference in our web sales. In 2009, we have seen a shift from less than 30% online versus phone orders to over 50% in Q4. . In addition we’ve seen our close rate of web traffic triple from .8% to 2.4%.

Round 3 - Building on success

As a leading BSP in the IL space, we have a few more tricks up our sleeve in 2010. This Spring, we will be adding even more user friendly features such as one click buying, 360 degree device views, accessory recommendations and integrations with OVM to name a few. Keep an eye out for more developments on the horizon. As the wireless industry and customer buying habits evolve, rest assured that your Bluefish hosted IL websites will lead the way.

In February, we asked our current Sprint account teams to review our performance based on the Bluefish IL program.
Here is what we learned:

Please rate your Bluefish IL experience within each category.

Why have you chosen Bluefish wireless for your IL needs on this account?

Why have you decided to use the Bluefish IL program over a Sprint Custom Aisle site?

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your experience. We had a 70% survey take rate. Results above reflect the answers of all 30 respondents.