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Nearly Two-Thirds of Businesses in Typical Internet and Mobile Directories Not Ready or Responsive to Consumer Calls, FastCall411 Survey RevealsNEW YORK --(Business Wire)-- Nearly two-thirds of businesses listed in a typical Internet and mobile directories aren't responsive to an immediate consumer request for service. That's the major finding of a new survey of 5,000 local businesses, conducted in April in the Los Angeles area by FastCall411 (www.fastcall411.com), a startup dedicated to improving the search experience for consumers in need of local service providers. The company made the announcement at the 2007 Mobile Marketing Forum (MMF), held June 6-7 in New York. FastCall411 completed telephone calls to a diverse population of service businesses, from attorneys to auto body shops, from restaurants to pest control services. All were asked if they would accept a call from a consumer in need of immediate service. The prompt explained that the call was free to the business. While 36 percent of those surveyed indicated that they would accept such a call, 64 percent had disconnected numbers, busy signals, did not answer or otherwise did not respond. FastCall411 dialed 5,000 merchants during the middle of the business day. "People who use the Internet for local search will almost always go 'offline' for their transaction," said FastCall411 founder and CEO Richard Rosen. "For service businesses, contact is most often made by a phone call. However, the current user experience in local search falls short. Search providers have data challenges in terms of completeness, accuracy, and mostly importantly, relevancy of their underlying data. Search providers must still make a number of crucial improvements in the user interface (UI) and presentation of information. To truly satisfy a consumer's local search - particularly on a mobile device - providers need to deliver merchants who are in business and available. That starts with answering consumers' phone calls." "The FastCall411 survey results confirm both that there's lots of inaccurate data out there about local businesses and the fact that many small businesses are slow or unresponsive to telephone-based customer inquires," said Greg Sterling, principal, Sterling Market Intelligence. "And for customers calling from mobile phones, there's often an added 'need it now' aspect of the inquiry that makes response time even more important." "Our survey confirms that for the majority of phone inquiries to local merchants initiated from mobile or internet search the odds are against the consumer," Rosen noted. "What consumers searching locally from their mobile devices need is a path to relevant, available local service providers - a path that is more reliable than Yellow Pages, and faster than regular Web search. The consumer should be first in local mobile search. That's just good business sense." In the FastCall411 model, the consumer searches category and geography from a mobile device, the web or directory assistance and is presented a refined list of relevant local merchants. Each request submitted identifies the consumer need, and enables the available business to accept the current customer. Merchants accept phone calls only when they are available to service the consumer. Consumers win, since they are quickly and efficiently connected to a business eager for the call and ready to provide urgent service. The clear advantage over current local search is that the consumer doesn't have to call a long list to find someone to help at that moment. For local service providers, FastCall411 delivers merchants a better experience: "hot," valuable leads, delivered over the phone. According to a March 2006 report by the Kelsey Group and comScore, local search is the fastest growing area of web search. More than 70 percent of consumers now say they use the internet when shopping for products and services in their local area, and 54 percent saying they substitute Internet search for the phone book. About FastCall411 Based in Los Angeles, FastCall411 was founded by industry veteran Richard Rosen to meet the needs of the consumer first, knowing that when local search works, merchants and publishers will be served as well. FastCall411 is more reliable than Yellow Pages, faster than existing online local searches, and an ideal solution for mobile search. For more information, make a "fast call" to 323-799-4777 or contact [email protected]. |
