Small website problems often amount to big headaches for a few unlucky visitors. Use these tips to ensure every consumer has a satisfactory online interaction with your brand.
While many companies bend over backwards setting up systems that provide exemplary service to their customers in the real world, they are often at a loss when it comes to managing customer relationships in an online world. With more and more customers choosing to shop on the internet, providing the best online service is crucial to creating happy, loyal, lifelong customers.
Customers judge your performance as a brand by every interaction through all channels, including every click they make on your website. But online customer experiences vary dramatically from customer to customer based on a large number of factors. Unless you measure it, you don't know what quality of experience your customers are having.
Are you measuring the right things?
Most companies today with any significant online presence measure lots of performance indicators, including:
- Server availability
- Network availability
- Application response time to a scripted transaction
But none of the typical measures, like these, actually measure individual customers' experiences. At any given moment, the customers using your website are experiencing a range of different qualities of service, and consequently, are going through a range of states of satisfaction.
It can be quite a challenge for any business to understand the quality of the online service that each customer experiences and appreciate how each individual customer interacts with your brand online.
There are many variables and dependencies -- both inside and outside your organization -- involved in providing a great online user experience. But unlike the real world, the online channel lets you precisely measure every interaction from the customer's point of view. When you do, it can be quite revealing -- it becomes apparent that problems are rarely distributed evenly across your customer base, and some customers are very negatively affected by what you may have thought were minor issues. What typically happens is a few unlucky souls get hit very badly, so your minor problem has a huge impact on the unlucky ones.
Taking action
Once you are measuring individual customer experiences, your next question is almost certainly, "What am I going to do about it?" There are different courses of action that you can take:
- Do nothing.
- Try to fix whatever is causing the problem.
- Use the information to warn the call center that there is a problem.
- Update the customer records of those affected so that if they call to complain, the call center can respond appropriately.
- Proactively contact the customer to help them complete whatever process they were trying to do.
- Adjust the network infrastructure using the load balancers to route high-value customers and critical processes to unaffected resources.
- Change the content on the site to show the individual affected customer that you are aware of the problem, and suggest an alternate channel.
These types of actions fall into two camps: reactive and proactive. The reactive ones almost feel like you're shutting the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
The proactive ones are a whole lot more exciting, and are revolutionizing the way that we interact with customers, particularly in the U.S., where customer service has more value than in many parts of Europe.
In order to act on individual customers' experiences, though, you need to consider what the appropriate action is for that unique customer. Not all customers are equal, and high-value customers will warrant different treatment from low-value clients. For example, a high-value banking client that abandons an online account opening process should be contacted by phone, within the hour, to offer to complete the process by phone. But a low-value client will not warrant this level of service (and consequent expense) and will probably be contacted by email.
Event-based marketing systems enable organizations to communicate at the exact moment the customer is most engaged and receptive to an online message. By responding automatically to the actions of individual customers in real time, these systems can monitor critical customer events in the context of the customer's unique personal history and automatically initiate a real-time response on the website, via a CRM system, email, or text message.
Fewer dissatisfied customers
This can revolutionize a customer's experience by automatically initiating corrective actions in real time. By constantly monitoring at the individual customer and application level, you can automate an appropriate response and ensure that poor experiences and revenue leakage are addressed immediately. By detecting and fixing poor website performance in real time, businesses will be able to stop revenue leakage immediately.
Charles Nicholls is CEO and founder of SeeWhy Software, and author of "In Search of Insight."