The Power of e-Customer Care
by Theresa Lütge-Smith
These days, just about every customer is becoming an e-customer; the Web gives them what they've always wanted - a chance to express themselves, to get honest answers to their questions, and to share their interests and passions with other customers. Thanks to the Web, we now live in a "truth economy" where people tell one another the truth about whether a specific product or service is as good as its Web site says it is. Every customer that a company has is part salesperson and part watchdog for that company. The role of a Web site is to serve as a magnet for customers, and you can't create a magnet without the pull of open, honest conversation between customers. Either you work with them to make your company better, or they work together to tear your company down.
Encourage customers to use their network to promote your site by sharing with friends. Install a Recommend-It.com referral system (www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/recommend-it.htm) that facilitates world-of-mouth advertising. Encourage visitors to e-mail or fax your Web page or newsletter to their friends.
The Miniaturization of Marketing
Information and communications technology are miniaturizing the discipline of marketing in the same way that the Walkman miniaturized the music-listening experience, or the microwave oven has miniaturized the cooking experience. This marketing discipline creates a paradigm shift that moves a product-oriented perspective to a customer-oriented one-to-one marketing perspective.
Collaborative Marketing
Collaborative marketing occurs when you listen as the customer speaks, and when you invite a customer to participate in actually making the product, before asking the customer to take it. The only way you can get more business from any single customer is by solving that particular customer's problems and removing the obstacles between the customer and your product or service.
Collaborate with satisfied customers to generate other customers
This kind of program depends on the credible, word-of-mouth objectivity of one customer's comments to another. You want to be able to ask your recommenders to serve as a 'sounding board' by providing honest, objective opinions and just talking about their actual experiences with your product. Identify your most satisfied current customers as recommenders. This may be an expensive program because to induce your satisfied customers to collaborate with you, you're going to have to recruit them, and then compensate them.
Customer dissatisfaction as a marketing tool
If you're concerned because you never hear complaints, you should be. Just because you don't hear them doesn't mean they don't exist. How you handle a complaint says a lot about your company's commitment to customer satisfaction and product quality. Solve complaints as a collaborative function, which provides the opportunity to work with an individual customer to solve that customer's problems. If complaints are opportunities to improve your product and service, consider making it easy for customers to complain. Put a very simple satisfaction survey at every point of customer contact. Ask a customer for feedback about any unsatisfactory element of his or her experience. Once you discover a complaint, it should be relatively simple to resolve it in a collaborative way.
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The Power of Relationships
We live in a world in which persuasive messages of various types continually vie for our attention and favor. The average customer is exposed to over 5000 persuasive messages a day, in many diverse formats. In today's business climate there's so much information, choice, and change that it is hard to get the attention of customers. But once you've got their attention, the tactics you use to create desire and demand for your products or services will impact directly on building lasting relationships.
Customer Care is about communication and relationships. Leveraging relationships with customers is one of the best ways for an e-business to grow its competitive advantage. It creates a platform for managing change across the virtual supply chain between employees, partners and customers. It empowers customers, partners and suppliers by integrating disparate applications to provide a single, cohesive customer view of the enterprise. It empowers marketing and sales with an infinitely expandable library of customer questions.
The Power of Values
In its early days the Internet was open territory for brand marketing; today however, industry-savvy webmasters know that "sustainable identity" - whether for a dotcom or a bricks and mortar business - offers greater opportunities and challenges due to the potential of one-to-one relationship building and the general nature of the Web's user-driven environment. Creating a sustainable brand, means knowing how to balance your core identity with the need for perpetual makeovers. This form of online branding is built on the holistic experience - the images people see when they access a Web site, the words they read, as well as the speed and style of any responses. Yet, online branding isn't just about images, logos, catchphrases and advertising; it's first and foremost about the philosophy and character of the business, and your relationship with a customer.
Create a conceptual "umbrella" that includes Performance Marketing and establish venues - virtual or real - where you can bring together customers and key industry players. Internet Performance Marketing includes customer orientation, total quality control, suggestion systems, zero defects, new product development, small group activities, productivity improvement, statistical quality control, and cooperative customer-employee relations. Use your Web presence to share what you know; and bear in mind, the key to competitive online success is continual improvement.
Internet Performance Marketing
Internet Performance Marketing is a closed loop process that begins with driving visitors to your Web site and ends with closed business that is directly attributed to marketing activities such as Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, Webcasting, e-mail Campaigns, and Web Advertising. Develop an effective marketing strategy by comparing traditional marketing activities with Internet Performance Marketing and how buyers respond to them. The principals and objectives are very similar in the offline and online world. The ability to capture information about Web visitors allows you to study the buying process more closely, in order to fine-tune your online marketing activities to achieve your sales objectives.
Your customers may include some e-commerce heavyweights who stand to lose millions of dollars if your equipment falters even for a few minutes. Take customer data and turn it into knowledge that helps you acquire and retain loyal customers through virtual customer care. Service options include knowledge-related functions, customer relationship management and Business Processes. Capture, analyze, warehouse, administer and establish metrics for customer information. Prospect new customers, qualify leads and increase sales. Use this information to manage your customer relationships to produce knowledge-based, integrated solutions that improve customer loyalty and your bottom line.
PART TWO: Putting Customers in Charge
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