Customer-centric e-Business 3

 

Care for your customer: As the competitive terrain becomes more challenging to navigate, it is the ability to translate customer knowledge into meaningful customer care initiatives that will differentiate one company from another.

A smiling face and courteous, articulate speech count for little on the Internet or at the mobile phone interface. Rather, the following can serve as ground rules for Internet-based customer care: don't waste our time. Ensure that your website is easy and straightforward to navigate with a clear site structure. Site maps and search mechanisms are useful navigational aids for the hasty web surfer.

Don't use glitzy graphics that slow down loading of your site (remember, most surfers still use limited bandwidth dial-up links). Follow the “three-click rule”: no link/page should be more than three clicks away or you risk frustrating or annoying the surfer.

For other e-delivery channels (mobile phone, ATM, etc) follow the KISS (Keep it Simple & Simple) rule. Don't bore or intimidate us: deploy an intuitive interface which is easy to use and appropriate to the intended audience and context.

Populate your site with up-to-date content that is relevant, accurate and fresh. Make sure your service delights us: deploy value-adding initiatives that reflect your understanding of the customer and his needs. These may include free stuff such as e-mail facilities, insightful newsletters, articles, useful links, tools, etc, as may be appropriate.
Put yourself in our shoes: a web-presence helps you to amass valuable customer information on preferences and behaviour, which you can use to personalise the customer connection.

Remember who we are: deploy effective security mechanisms to ensure that your customers' privacy is protected on your website and that confidentiality is maintained in web transactions. A security glitch would adversely affect customer confidence.

Deliver value to your customer: that's the real clincher. That's what will set apart the winners from the laggards. Winning in the e-business terrain will require organisations to deliver value consistently and persistently to their customers through multiple delivery channels, your web-presence and mobile phone being the most vital.

I must stress here that value must be as defined by the customer. How can we deliver value? Don't promise what you can't deliver! Click here for “Internet Banking”: yet, you know that feature is NOT (yet?) functional.
Rather than showcase your ambitious plans to the visitor, such unfulfilled promises risk insulting their intelligence. Remove all those dead or broken links from your site. Furthermore, don't promise a 24-hour response when you do not intend to meet it.

Don't ask for feedback if you don't check or use it (I recently visited a site and obliged a feedback request only to get the mail promptly returned with a message indicating the inbox was full!). Do what you say you will do: this is a simple corollary to the above.

Trust and credibility are vital assets on the Internet. Build trust by giving prompt and courteous acknowledgements, realistic indications for responses, protecting the visitors' privacy and so on.
Make sure your right hand knows what the left hand is doing: delivering on promises requires well-integrated processes and effective back office support. Bill Gates says, “It's not as simple as saying everyone has to have a website and do e-commerce. It is a profound change in terms of how information flows inside companies, to partners, and to customers.”

Apologise for any mistake: things may go wrong. How we handle them is what matters. Apologise when the site is unavailable, when we fail to deliver on promises or simply goof in one way or the other.

I leave you with this final quote: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends with one message to a newsgroup. If you make them really happy, they can tell 6,000 people about that.” - Jeff Bezos - CEO Amazon.com.