‘Bricks and mortar’ retail strategies are battling against some difficult economic conditions right now

It’s no secret that ‘bricks and mortar’ retail strategies are battling against some difficult economic conditions right now. Mobile operators are by no means immune to this. Indeed, on many levels, as operators fight to remain relevant to consumers, within an increasing decentralised mobile value-chain, those challenges are concentrated further. All told, with the realisation that change will not be achieved through incremental alterations to the established model, leading a mobile operator’s retail strategy must be one of the most challenging jobs in telecoms right now.

Fundamentally, the relationship between mobile operator and consumer is changing. Relationships are now more complex and multi—faceted, with multiple brands now influencing the customer’s wireless experience. To remain relevant, and to secure the customer’s long-term loyalty, the role of the traditional store must change too. It must find a new balance between delivering on the functional requirements of the business (customer acquisition and retention) and driving more relevant and emotional relationships with customers.

The in-store experience has always been a vital touch-point in the operator-to-consumer relationship. Historically, it has only been leveraged at the start of the customer relationship – with occasional re-visits for accessory sales and support. While remaining a principle channel for customer acquisition, the in-store experience must now evolve. It must become integral and relevant across the entire customer lifecycle – from initial evaluation and set-up to continued service and maintenance.

Indeed, mobile operators may be one of the few retailers on the high street able to use this strategy to defend their bricks and mortar position. Unfortunately, the pace at which change can occur is often stifled by legacy practices; and for mobile operators this comes in the form of high-street stores being measured against customer acquisition and not the profitability of the customer over their lifetime.

With a change in performance management, and with tighter integration into its own online [fulfilment] channels, threats such as ‘showrooming’, where customers evaluate products in-store, but purchase elsewhere, become less of a problem for operators. This is because they are unchained from acquisition measures and can see the role a bricks and mortar presence can have in developing and retaining customers.

Physical stores can’t beat online for convenience and filling display units with more stock will not be enough. Instead a personalised, branded and guided ownership experience that matches products and services to customers’ lifestyles will be a core differentiator. With a customer relationship that [ideally] spans several years, surprisingly few operators are looking at the role their high-street assets play in retention and customer lifetime value; creating physical environments within which to access support, explore and discover new services and even act as a ‘click and collect’ location for customers to collect their online purchases.

However, such change must also be sympathetic to operators’ own online, multi-channel ambitions. Customers may demand a differentiated experience through physical stores, but they’ll still expect consistency as they ‘hop’ between the operator’s multiple channels. Information, pricing and support must be consistent regardless of the destination. This will require much tighter integration with marketing and merchandising teams to deliver more consistent messaging and device positioning across all channels. Intelligence regarding customer requirements and expectations should be fed-back by retail, helping all functions to better segment customers against device ranging decisions. Inventory management must also be better synchronised to support the multi-channel ‘hopping’ of customers and avoid any misalignment between demand seen in one channel and stock availability in another.

It’s not unrealistic to assume that a number of mobile operator executives around the world will be questioning the function (and viability) of their physical stores at this very moment. Incremental changes to the model will not wash though. Rather a complete shake-up of how operators consider and calculate the value that a bricks and mortar presence can deliver across the entire customer lifetime must be adopted. For example, while customer acquisition must remain a core, there must be greater attention given to the ‘quality’ of a sale. After all, two different sales experiences will result in two very different customer profitability templates. In some instances, retail agent commission gets paid even if the customer subsequently returns a device or disconnects as a result of poor product/service right-sizing. Legacy practices such as this simply aren’t competitive nor are they sustainable.

Ultimately, mobile products and services remain a complex sale and the physical store remains one of the few touch-points in the entire customer lifecycle where face to face engagement between the customer and the mobile operator is possible. This will remain vital in right-sizing wireless solutions to customers; and mitigating the unnecessary costs that for too long has inhibited improvements in customer margin. As such, the opportunity to deliver a highly personalized in-store experience is compelling.

By Tim Deluca-Smith, VP of Marketing at WDS, A Xerox Company

There is a significant disconnect between what drives loyalty among mobile consumers and what mobile operators believe drives loyalty as well as churn. Research released at MWC this week suggests that consumers in general will focus on a single aspect of their mobile service – such as device, tariff, or coverage – whereas operators tend to believe that a collection of issues drive positives and negatives in churn and loyalty.

The study, carried out by MobileSquared on behalf of Tecnotree, found that 90 per cent of consumers believe they are loyal to their mobile operator. But over one fifth of these have changed carrier in the last six months, with a similar number planning to do so in the coming months.

This implies that at any one time there is only a settled subscriber base of around 50 per cent. Yet the study also found that the longer a customer stays with the same operator, the more likely they are to spend on non-communication services.

Key to driving loyalty and decreasing churn today are better devices and tariffs, but going forward, Tecnotree and MobileSquared believe 4G connectivity will be the ultimate weapon.

The study found that almost 60 per cent of respondents said they would move to a different carrier in order to access 4G connectivity. As a result, those which have already launched LTE should be looking to capitalise on it as soon as possible, while those that haven’t will need to talk to their customers and explain their plans for provisioning the technology.

AfricaCom, Cape Town, South Africa, November 13th 2012 – Astellia, a leading provider of monitoring solutions for the optimization of mobile network QoS and QoE, joins hands with Vodacom Mozambique to implement its VIP Care CEM solution. The application is intended to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty particularly amongst high value subscribers.

Vodacom is the second largest MNO in Mozambique and is since 2009 majority owned by Vodafone, one of the world’s largest communication companies by revenue. Building trust and loyalty among their customers and giving them what they want is paramount. By using Astellia’s customer centric VIP Care solution, Vodacom will be able to monitor the quality of experience of their subscribers, from a single subscriber up to a group of users. VIP Care equally helps Vodacom define and monitor Service Level Agreements (SLA) with their customers based on Key Quality Indicators.

“By providing Vodacom with VIP focused investigation capabilities for anticipating and detecting service delivery degradation, Astellia is proud to contribute to offering premium voice and data services to Vodacom’s high revenue generating customers.” comments Jean-Philippe Larvol, Astellia’s Managing Director for Africa.

About Astellia – www.astellia.com

Astellia is a global leader providing E2E mobile network monitoring and optimization solutions, presenting telecom operators with a clear, independent insight into their network performance and a near real-time visibility of the QoE of their subscribers. Astellia’s probe-based monitoring solution covers 2G, 3G and 4G technologies from radio access to the core network. Astellia delivers real business value by providing intelligence through a powerful product and expert service portfolio. Astellia partners with more than 180 worldwide telecom operators. Headquartered in France, Astellia has offices in Paris, New York, Reston, Singapore, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Prague, Saint Petersburg, Pretoria and New Delhi.

Press contact

Esther DUVAL
Communication Manager
Tel.: +33 299 048 060
e.duval@astellia.com

Unrepresentative data on battery life is leading to operator customer service departments fielding four times as many calls on the issue than in 2008

Smartphone manufacturers are leaving customers disappointed with their operators by not quoting battery performance in a way that reflects day-to-day use, according to a study published today.

Customer experience specialist WDS analysed the battery life of 50 of the top smartphones launched over the past year and compared them alongside two million technical support calls taken on behalf of global mobile operators and handset manufacturers.

The findings showed that, for the majority, the battery life of handsets was not quoted in a way that represented how consumers use their devices. This has led to operators fielding four times as many calls regarding battery performance than they received in 2008. As a result, customer service calls relating to battery usage have now risen to make up ten per cent of all hardware related technical support calls.

Despite activities such as web browsing, watching videos and using downloadable apps have become an everyday part of smartphone use, their impact on battery performance is largely excluded from the data published by manufacturers. Only two of the 50 devices that were reviewed by WDS included information on expected battery life for web browsing -  Apple’s iPhone 4S and Nokia’s N9. Instead, consumers are typically left to make comparisons based on stand-by time and 2G talk-time.

“The majority of manufacturers simply publish stand-by and talk-time figures, which have the lowest drain on smartphone battery performance,” explained Tim Deluca-Smith, VP of marketing at WDS. “This means that when consumers start using their smartphones in earnest – downloading and using apps and browsing the web – they often find their battery lasts less than they expected.”

Another report from J.D. Power and Associates, released in March 2012, also suggested that those manufacturers who do publish more accurate battery life data benefit from customer loyalty, with Apple ranking highest in customer satisfaction among smartphone manufacturers.

“A vital aspect of customer experience is setting the right expectation. No single manufacturer can really overcome the limitations of today’s batteries, but they can take the lead in better informing customers,” added Deluca-Smith. “This will not only boost satisfaction, but will also save money for them and their mobile operator partners. Battery life is not something that a consumer can gauge in-store. Simply stating that a device has a 1700mAh battery is meaningless; performance data needs to be in line with real-world use.”

The web-based VIP Care application enables service providers to quickly assess the QoE perceived by any individual subscriber to a group of users such as a corporate fleet in one single view. VIP Care helps operators define and monitor Service Level Agreements (SLA) with their customers based on Key Quality Indicators.

The multi-technology application provides reporting, analytics and troubleshooting capabilities to marketing, customer care and network optimization departments. It delivers actionable intelligence by correlating information including network, handset, voice and data service usage. Subscriber’s activity statistics are available such as number of calls made, number of dropped calls, etc. Gauges provide a prompt insight into the QoS of voice, messaging and data services. If a quality threshold is violated, alarms are triggered automatically. Users can then quickly drill down to more detailed KPIs (HO, ISHO, CSSR, etc) and in-depth analysis of all calls and data sessions. Finally VIP Care enables engineering teams to localize precisely the cells regularly used by VIPs and prioritize optimization tasks on these strategic areas.

“Thanks to these CEM dashboards, it becomes quite straightforward to anticipate if an individual user is at risk of encountering any specific problem. By drilling down the different dimensions, the root cause of the issue can be identified. VIP Care is also an excellent tool to develop new high value offers for quality demanding subscribers and gain strong competitive advantage.” explains Laurence Gesny, VIP Care Product Manager at Astellia.

About Astellia – www.astellia.com

Astellia is a global leader providing E2E mobile network monitoring and optimization solutions, presenting telecom operators with a clear, independent insight into their network performance and a near real-time visibility of the QoE of their subscribers. Astellia’s probe-based monitoring solution covers 2G, 3G and 4G technologies from radio access to the core network. Astellia delivers real business value by providing intelligence through a powerful product and expert service portfolio. Astellia partners with more than 180 worldwide telecom operators. Headquartered in France, Astellia has offices in Beirut, Guargon, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Prague, Pretoria, Reston, Rio de Janeiro, Saint Petersburg and Singapore.

Press contact

Esther DUVAL

Communication Manager

Tel.: +33 (0)2 99 04 80 60

e.duval@astellia.com

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There was also plenty at the event on other hot topics, including analytics and BI, policy management, multi-channel interaction and device management, and of course that new staple of countless telecoms IT presentations – how to use real-time analytics to fix issues in the network before customers even become aware of them.

At this year’s Forumville I spent the most time in the Revenue Management zone which had a number of interesting Catalyst project demos around analytics, advanced billing and revenue assurance topics; although other topics covered this year also included Cloud and new digital services, cable services and Frameworx implementation. One of the more thought-provoking Catalyst project was one championed by a combination of IBM/Netezza, Aha! Software, Telecom Italia, Ventraq and China Mobile and which focused on advancing CEM analytics. IBM has been very active in positioning itself in this space and IBM had a strong story to tell on ‘dashboarding’ and ‘flashboarding’ to aggregate operational data from the network and using analytics to gain maximum value from it.

As mentioned, CEM was pretty much in the spotlight. On the first day of the event Alcatel-Lucent announced the launch of its Managed Service Quality and Assurance (MSQA) solution, a managed services addition to the Motive Customer Experience Solutions portfolio the vendor announced back in February. The managed services offering takes advantage of Alcatel-Lucent’s existing base of network operations centers to deliver consistent service quality across a variety of devices.

Certainly one of the common themes in Dublin was the need to offer a variety of different delivery mechanisms for BSS and OSS, including on-premise systems, private cloud or managed services. All vendors were at it. Whether it was NetCracker highlighting its expanding OSS/BSS solutions and services portfolio following its recent acquisition of Convergys Information Management (IM) assets, or NSN talking about the delivery options for its impressive CEM on Demand offering, most vendors were offering a variety of delivery models, especially if they plan to target both Tier 1 and Tier 2/3 operators.

Although it wasn’t technically launching it yet at the event, NSN also unveiled a new ‘Operations on Demand’ product to simplify network operations and deliver efficiency gains by making use of a number features, including automatic auditing based on predefined rules and operator policies, as well as multi-language interfaces and support and easier monitoring. NSN plans to sell ‘Operations on Demand’ as a separate product rather than an add-on to its NetAct portfolio. Given the complexity of the network operations and processes CSPs currently have to manage, automation and simplification is a strong card to play in the support systems space.

HP also announced a number of upgrades to CEM and CX products, including enhancements to its HP Actionable Customer Intelligence and HP OSS Transformation portfolios, including automated tools to speed up problem identification and resolution.

Meanwhile in a briefing on the Ericsson ship moored outside on the Liffey the vendor had plenty to say about customer experience and the need for integrated, convergent, network-aware OSS/BSS to support it. The messages was illustrated with an impressive range of references, including an OSS transformation project with Q-Tel subsidiary Nedjma in Algeria that had a strong CX and service assurance element as well as a fascinating cloud and IT optimization project with H3G Italy. There was less said though than one might have hoped about the Ericsson/Telcordia integration. Ericsson claims this is coming along faster than the previous LHS integration did but still it would be good to have heard more by now.

Most of my time was spent in briefings and meetings but one conference session I managed to attend was a Customer Experience Panel in the CX stream of the conference. This included warnings about the limits of personalization, including the sound advice that you shouldn’t send discount coupons to people who have bought adult diapers or, as happened in one case in the US, send pregnancy-related offers to the home address of a 15-year old girl who has not yet told her parents. It doesn’t take much to potentially upset customers with over-targeting.

Of course not everything in Dublin was about new business models and technologies. As TMF President and COO Martin Creaner pointed out in his keynote presentation, the number one thing in the mind of most CIOs is still reducing operating IT costs.

TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts also had some good points to make around how the ‘SaaSification’ of business will make things cheaper but he couldn’t resist also promoting his new ‘Unzipping the Digital World’ book. Many of us received a free copy of this weighty tome so I imagine Aer Lingus and Ryanair did well from excess baggage charges.

In 2013 Management World moves back to the French Riviera and Nice, so we can all look forward to an equally sunny outlook for telecoms IT next year.

The first time I heard about CEM, eight years ago, it concerned how operators could improve customer channels, call-quality assurance and first-call resolution. Operators are creating their own CEM areas, normally reporting directly to the company’s CEO. The focus of CEM is still on customer channels and customer care. This is an obvious area of focus, since it’s normally a sensitive moment in the customer/operator relationship when the customer contacts the operator. However, the fact that the new CEM areas are reporting directly to the CEO demonstrates operators’ willingness to evolve to a more holistic approach, assuring a great customer experience throughout the entire customer life cycle.

The conference started with an interesting presentation from Rogers Canada, which presented its “no frills” Fido brand. For the operator, CEM starts with the brand, its mission and values. To bring all the operator’s departments into the same boat, it is important to transmit the brand values to the entire organization and make CEM part of the brand’s DNA. The operator has a management council that evaluates the brand, customer satisfaction, CEM and churn on an ongoing basis, and all operator departments have been involved in the strategy since the beginning and play an end-to-end role.

Also at the conference, Belgacom demonstrated how CEM can be applied in areas beyond customer care. The operator reviewed its service’s offers in order to provide a simpler portfolio that will make it easier for the customer to choose the right bundle. Some of its initiatives range from helping customers set up a new smartphone (reducing the rate of return on those devices) to proactively helping customers install broadband equipment at home (Belgacom can identify when customers are having problems with the plug-and-play equipment and call them to offer help). Furthermore, Belgacom has reviewed its contact-center processes to reduce waiting times, improve IVR capabilities and simplify the customer bill. Therefore, the operator is approaching CEM as a more holistic strategy, including different touch points at different stages of the customer relationship.

Vodafone Italy has demonstrated how to use social networking to improve its interaction with customers. The company has created its own community (in addition to its Twitter and Facebook presences) with which it can interact and test new concepts. Vodafone also says that it’s important to have a dedicated team to manage its interaction through Twitter and that members of the team need to more familiar with social-media communities than traditional customer-service agents are.

The other big topic discussed during the conference was the “customer journey” and how the operator can be prepared to offer and manage the different channels for different customer profiles at different stages of the relationship. Orange demonstrated how it is offering consistency across the different channels and focusing on lifetime value. “Customer journey” seems to be a key element of operators’ channel strategies.

The interesting thing is that I am now at a conference about policy control, and CEM is also a hot topic. I was wondering what would happen if we joined the two audiences: On the one hand, the CRM, marketing and customer-care managers, and on the other hand IT and network managers. I think the discussions would be insightful.

Sowing the seed of loyalty

Not too long ago, “customer acquisition” was something of a dirty term in the cellular industry. Operators were queasy with the hangover from their land grabbing activities and the focus turned to customer retention as they sought to identify the highest value customers and keep them in the fold.

The industry operates on cycles, though, and acquisition has now come back to the fore—driven, as much within the industry is today, by the arrival of the smartphone era. That era, of course, was ushered in by the iPhone and—yet again—Apple’s influence can be detected in some of the key shifts that we are witnessing.

While retail is once again a key priority for operators, the focus is less on shifting boxes and signing up cud-munching consumers than on using this first point of contact as a launch pad for the somewhat ephemeral Customer Experience. The ideal is that everything the operator’s brand stands for can somehow be distilled into a retail experience that leaves each customer feeling so happy with the product they’ve bought that they never want to churn. Nowhere else in the mobile operator’s business is the ideal more divorced from the reality.

Network technology, broadly speaking, works. And when something goes wrong with it, the problem can be identified and fixed. This is because technology obeys laws of physics. People are an altogether more unpredictable element of the operator’s world—employees as well as customers—and this is what makes customer experience management in general, and retail in particular, such tricky games to play.

Nonetheless, the retail phase of the customer lifecycle is benefiting from a great deal of analysis and investment as operators try to refine their acquisition activities. Greater sophistication in the retail process is necessary because of greater sophistication in the devices and services being retailed—and the blend of channels being used by operators to initiate contracts is a delicate balancing act.

In addressing the retail experience they offer as smartphones become more pervasive, operators need to look at potential retail outcomes. According to Tim Deluca-Smith , VP for marketing at customer experience specialist WDS, there are four potential destinations in retail, and only one of them is good.

The first sees the customer taking ownership of the device and finding, after some initial experimentation, that they are defeated by the complexity of the handset and/or the associated services. The user then reverts to basic service use, such as voice and text. In the second scenario the initial experience is the same but the user is more motivated to overcome their difficulties. In being so, however, they become a support burden to the operator. A third customer might simply return the phone—resulting in wasted time or even churn—while in the fourth, ideal scenario, the customer is well matched to the product and services they have bought, and is well set up to become a profitable user.

“Getting things right in that first retail period will really shape the profitability of the customer,” Deluca-Smith says. “When we do root cause analyses as part of a support contract, it’s amazing how many of the issues can be traced back to a deficiency in the retail phase. Products are too often incorrectly matched or mis-sold.”

The importance of properly aligning customers with products is driving some operators to promote their physical stores in the retail channel mix. Online and call centre sales may well be more convenient and cost effective, but person-to-person interaction is now seen as extremely important by operators looking to inject the customer experience into the retail process.

The influence of Apple’s retail stores cannot be overestimated here. Vodafone’s director of content services, Lee Epting, says that, “in terms of retail customer experience, Apple set the bar with its Genius Bar.” This facet of Apple’s retail environment, where a number of in-store agents are trained to an expert degree in the firm’s products and solutions, enabling them to answer any customer query or demonstrate any process, is a defining element of the firm’s customer experience. There is a very short evolutionary line between Apple’s Genius Bar and O2UK’s Guru programme, introduced in 2010.

In the run-up to Christmas 2011, there was a two-week waiting list for an appointment with an O2 Guru at the firm’s flagship store on London’s Oxford Street retail centre, which shows demand exceeding supply, if nothing else. O2 has also set up a YouTube channel for its Guru project, in a bid to catch the overspill of customers looking for that extra level of tuition.

As more and more subscribers upgrade to more sophisticated devices, it seems unlikely that the renewed importance of the physical store will diminish anytime soon.

The average in-store device sale across the industry is getting longer, according to research from WDS, and now sits at around 40 minutes. As more and more subscribers upgrade to more sophisticated devices, it seems unlikely that the renewed importance of the physical store will diminish anytime soon.

This may be a difficult reality for some within operators to accept. For an executive tasked with increasing efficiencies in the retail process, the duration of the sale is a KPI that needs to be reduced, not extended. The longer a sales agent spends talking to a customer who has already decided to buy a device, the less time they will have to convince the next person that comes into the store. But if the extra time spent with that first customer deflects one or two future customer support interactions, it is time well spent.

Programmes like O2’s Gurus are motivated in part by public relations, and rely on glossy visibility to create a sense of the brand values the operator wants to project. But putting the customer experience into the retail phase of the customer lifecycle has to be done throughout the operator’s processes. As WDS’ Deluca-Smith has it: “There’s more to a good retail experience than a shiny store full of good looking people. “

This is especially true given that not all retail activity happens in-store. While Vodafone’s Lee Epting argues that remote retail channels “will never be that significant overall,” because, “users want to be able to touch the devices and discuss them with knowledgeable staff,” the fact is that, for some customers, online retail, online chat and call centre sales are actually preferable.

“These kind of channels were originally introduced as a cost reduction,” says Igor Sarenac, VP for communications at Convergys. “But things have changed. The younger and upcoming generations simply prefer the web channel. And that’s the generation that will be around for a very long time.”

These users might not research their purchases in store, preferring to rely on online comparisons, social media and unofficial user feedback to help them make their decisions. They will then look to make the purchase online. Clearly in this environment it is more difficult for operators to inject customer experience into the retail process than when they are presenting users with an in-store ambassador for the brand.

Most operators have automated, database-oriented systems that allow users to create what they’re told is a “bespoke” package by selecting services they like to use and the volume of minutes, text messages or data they might consume (largely useless in the last case since almost nobody understands the correlation between content consumption and data consumption). But these are inherently restrictive and, if an operator wants to project the customer experience through online chat or call centre retail processes, flexibility and dynamism are paramount.

Perhaps ironically, given Lee Epting’s comments, one of the carriers most adept at this—according to Igor Sarenac—is Vodafone. “They try to be able to respond to anything a customer wants in real time, to be as dynamic as possible,” he says. “What they try to do is to say “yes” to customers.” Clearly injecting customer experience into the retail process is about moving away from price as a differentiator, rather than simply meeting customer’s tariff demands, but Sarenac suggests it is a more subtle approach.

“The idea is to create a positive relationship with the client, to say “yes” even when you don’t really mean it. You might be saying that certain things are possible, but explaining to the customer that there are certain requirements that have to be met in order to get those things,” he says. “Clients are much more receptive to this approach than to being told that they’re not eligible for something, or not entitled to it. Operators need to satisfy customer needs in a way that suits their business. Don’t turn down the client, given them a choice. Because if you push back, the client will go somewhere else and never come back,” he says.

Operators are now using online chat sales agents to snare potential customers that are browsing their retail sites comparing tariffs and handset pricing. The offer of a chat session is triggered automatically and the potential customer is questioned by a real person and responded to in real time. The appeal of this channel for operators is that, in a world where consumers have rejected off-shore call centres because of language and accent barriers—and because of a feeling of remoteness—it offers the best of both worlds. Written communication skills can be higher in off-shore environments than spoken communication skills, drawing a veil over the fact that the transaction is being conducted across a gap of thousands of miles.

Native speakers of the language might see through the veil, though, as operators in some cases are carefully scripting the responses that their agents are permitted to give, in line with their desire to create a positive “yes” environment. Indeed, according to Sarenac, ‘soft skills’ is an area drawing increasing investment from operators looking to set themselves apart on customer experience.

But retail is not an environment in which many people look to forge a career. Even in a flagship store in a European capital, the staff are likely to view their roles as transitory—12 months to two years to earn some money, and then off they go to do something else. Retail is a high turnover environment and yet operators must invest in training to ensure that their sales agents are winning the customers personal investment as well as their financial one.

And this is the biggest problem with customer experience in retail: An operator can have the best systems in place, the most dynamic approach to tariff building and a chief of retail sitting in head office who genuinely believes in the sales environment they are trying to create. But it simply cannot be guaranteed that the person standing face to face with the customer, on the other end of the phone, or typing responses into the chat window, will be motivated to act as an ambassador for the customer experience.

Customer experience is people dependent—and people are nowhere near as dependable as the technology mobile operators employ them to sell.