Many months ago, someone, I can’t remember who, retweeted something from a chap called Jeremy Paul Baumgartner, it led me to his website www.jpb.com, where the first line was, and still is, “The secret to creative thinking is to start with good problems”.
I was at that time embarking on a new journey as a director of Callmaster Mobile and I knew there were many things we did well as a business because we had solutions to customer problems, however we also had things that troubled us and distracted us from our plans to grow our company.
Jeremy’s words made me determined to turn one of our problems into a productive idea, I had no idea it would lead to the launch of a whole new business.
One problem came from wanting to do the best and that was that our account manager’s we’re committed to providing the best advice to their customers, when this meant recommending a handset there were hundreds to choose from but good questioning could help reduce the list of potential choices making it easier for the customer to pick.
When it came to accessories and ancillary products there are tens of thousands, we had guys spending hours trawling through supplier lists and websites looking for the right products, once the customer had decided they could process the sale and the £1 profit would ring through the till for their hours work. Unfortunately bad business.
As a team of directors we knew this had to change, so we decided we could review all the recommendations we had made to customers, get a list of those products from the suppliers and list them on our Callmaster Mobile website as a reference point for future requests.
It snowballed from there really, firstly we thought why not have an enquiry box so if other customers saw it on the internet and wanted to also buy one we could get in touch. That moved to seeing if they could just buy through the Callmaster Mobile website, to then having a separate website for chargers, headphones, car kits and cases. The story behind the name More Than Just Mobiles will be saved for another day.
A few discreet conversations with people we knew in the mobile industry quickly highlighted that there was a lot more to the accessories business that just cases and chargers and that there was a clear business benefit to get involved.
What was clear though was that we needed someone, who knew about eCommerce, to not only build us our website but to educate us about the online sales world. This is where the power of Twitter kicked in, I had followed Zoe from B:Web because she was something of a local celebrity having been in an article in the Daily Mail and then on This Morning in a short space of time 🙂 Reading her tweets it became apparent she knew her stuff about websites and eCommerce, hell, she even ran sellout conferences about it, at the very least I was going to ask her for some advice.
Now, 6 months later, www.morethanjustmobiles.com is being built and we hope to bring you a unique insight from both the designer and the customer viewpoint during the process, across this blog and also on www.bwebsites.co.uk/blog.
Please do let us know what you think, and do what social media is designed for you to do, interact with us.