Buying Online - Why Your Customers Don't Want To Talk To You
by Editor, Web Wise Business (29 July 2010)
Chances are, everyone reading this has probably purchased something online in the last 12 months that they could have bought in a store. It's also likely that most of us will probably have noticed that, in the last couple of years, self service checkouts and kiosks are becoming more and more common and more frequently used. Why?
Well according to recent research by Harvard Business Review, the publishing subsidiary of the internationally renowned Harvard University, self-service and internet shopping are becoming increasingly popular because your customers don't want to talk to you.
Self Service
Despite many business leaders - from corporate to SME - choosing to run their operations as if customers wish to deal with them live, believing that, on average, their customers value live service twice as much as self-service, the research shows that today's average customer is statistically indifferent, valuing self-service as much as interaction in person or over the telephone. This doesn't simply apply to specific demographics either as, by and large, indifference holds regardless of the customers age, gender, issue type or urgency.
But why is self-service, either through kiosks or shopping online, so appealing?
| "Maybe it's the efficiency of the interaction — the airport kiosk is probably faster than interacting with a check-in agent — but that wouldn't explain why we go out of our way to take care of our service needs ourselves. On a psychological level, it might have more to do with the unique element of control that self service affords. Or, maybe this self-service love affair is a product of our infatuation with gadgetry and electronic communication" |
Customer Loyalty
The authors also make some interesting points regarding how these findings highlight not only operational inefficiencies, but also how poor self-service facilities can impact upon customer loyalty:
| "Running your company as if customers want to talk to you isn't just expensive, it's potentially undermining your efforts to build longer-term loyalty. Our research shows that customers who attempt to self serve, fail, and are forced to pick up the phone are 10% more likely to be disloyal than those customers who were able to fully resolve their issues in their channel of choice. As one CFO remarked to us recently, "When you think about the relative cost of live service and the disloyalty effect of channel switching...it's like paying your customers to be disloyal to you"...
...We found that a staggering 57% of inbound calls come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company's website. And over 30% of callers are on the company's website at the same time that they are talking to a rep on the phone. That's a lot of frustrated customers."
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The final remark simply serves to highlight just how important clear, simple to follow online service and checkout processes, and easy to understand instructions really are on your website.
So, does your e-commerce site get customers flying through the checkout, or in flying fits or rage?
Do your online FAQ's and product instructions leave clients enlightened, or simply laden with questions?
If you think the answer may be "yes" to either, it's probably worth getting in touch with your web developer and correcting these issues ASAP.
To read the full article on the Harvard Business Review,
click here.
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