With 59% of consumers feeling companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience, are your online digital efforts really connecting with your customers?
Many organisations just focus on the function and forget the human element of buying or enquiring online for both B2B and B2C. There is always a real person behind the enquiry or purchase, whether they appear on your doorstep, land in your inbox or arrive at your website.
Your website is often the first impression someone has of your brand, and you need to make that first impression the right impression. Consider what would you like them to think, feel, do when they arrive?
My guess is you’d like to engage with them and sell to them?
While that’s great, you need to anticipate that they might not be ready to buy yet. Thought should be given to where they are on the customer journey, they might be in the investigative, exploratory stage of their journey and just want to find out more about your products/services and indeed you as a company.
Regardless if you are a B2B or B2C organisation, you have to ensure you take people on a journey, encourage them into your ecosystem by being helpful, adding value and being of benefit to them. Do not hard sell or just offer them demos and don’t use email discount pop-ups as soon as they get to your site, if they’re not ready to purchase you could be pushing them away.
Think about it as if they had popped into your physical shop, store or office, the sales assistant or reception would ask ‘Can I help you?’ not ask for their email address or thrust a voucher in their hand as they walk in.
That’s why online isn’t an excuse to hard sell, it’s an opportunity to sell well if truly customer-centricity is focused on. The content, commerce and customer service functions on your website should all be a seamless digital experience.
Next time you visit a website as a potential customer (again B2B or B2C) make a note of how customer-centric you felt the website was for you, ask yourself: –
- Did it provide a logical route?
- Did it help you based on the intent you had at the time?
Then ask; what can you learn from this and how can you make your website experience better for your organisation?
