Customer Relationships in the Digital Age

How are you going to maintain human relationships in the digital world?

Business today relies on customer relationships. Products or services are rapidly copied and very often, there is a competitor somewhere prepared to offer a similar product for a lower price.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers concluded in their book, "The One-to-One Future":

"No matter how creative and innovative your firm is, the only software genuinely worth having is the customer relationship, based on mutual advantage and trust. Individual, differentiable customer relationships will be the ultimate software of businesses in the 1:1 future. All your products are ephemeral. Only your customers are real."

The Internet not only accelerates many of the competitive threats to your products, but can also make many of your dealings with your customers or potential customers appear impersonal and lacking in human contact. So how can we use the benefits of the Internet whilst at the same time creating and maintaining personal relationships?

There are many ways to develop relationships on-line. Email is probably the most widely used. Email your customers regular newsletters, advance notices, special offers, personalized news or links and articles that you think might be of interest to them.

Do you have an email response policy?

Where many companies fall down is in not having an email response policy. Many of today's Internet users expect very prompt responses to email. Too many companies lose their chance to create a relationship by being slow or not responding to email messages.

In a recent survey of 325 British web sites only 62% responded to a simple email query (see results at www.buchanan.co.uk) - i.e. 38% did not respond at all! When E-service vendor Brightware tested the USA's 100 largest companies with a simple email query - "What is your headquarter address?", only 15% responded within three hours. Amazingly, 36% could not be emailed from their web address. Another 10% never bothered to answer, while some took up to 23 days to respond! (www.brightware.com).

If you do provide an email address, determine who is to answer the emails (including back ups for when the nominated person is away), in what time frame they are to be answered, and if appropriate, how responses are to be authorized.

Companies can consider having autoresponders to acknowledge all queries, standard responses to frequently asked questions, and even work flow processes that notify senior managers if a response has not been sent within the agreed time frame.

Chat and Discuss with 'em

Relationships can also be built and maintained by the use of chat rooms. An expert hosted chat forum can be quite a good way to drive traffic to your site provided it is properly marketed. Virtual events and conferences could prove useful for some companies. Consider using products such as at www.webex.com, which provides a free service for the sharing of documents and presentations, and enables you to jointly surf the web.

Discussion groups can not only create and maintain relationships between you and your customers, but also help customers get in touch with each other. These can be unmediated, in which case they have more credibility, or moderated if you prefer more control. Discussion groups can be self hosted or you can use the increasingly powerful services provided by the free communities at www.deja.com or clubs at www.yahoo.com. These latter services can be links from your home page and allow messages to be sent to members, new members to be personally invited, and a number of relevant forums created.

An on-line community can be an extremely powerful marketing tool. It is where people with a common interest in a topic gather to learn and share about the topic. If you are not going to create an on-line community (it may be too expensive or not appropriate) then you may want to consider existing communities which you can sponsor or have banner advertisements placed to draw customers to your site.

Get 'em to talk and complain

To deepen a relationship with a customer you need to find out more about his wants and needs. Therefore, make it easy for your customers to contact you. Make your email address prominent and easy to find, together with your toll free number. You can consider the use of forms to gather the required information or customer surveys either on your site or emailed to your customers.

Also, make it easy for customers to complain. When someone complains he is presenting you with an opportunity to collaborate in solving a problem. You can then build loyalty and referrals. Just make sure you have a good process for handling complaints with some agreed service levels so you can monitor your performance. Consider a prize or some reward for the best comments (www.alghuraircentre.com/survey.htm) to encourage visitors to fill in your feedback or survey forms..

Get 'em to keep coming back

Relationships can also be built simply by getting people to repeatedly return to your web site. Gaining share of their desktop is a good way to gain top of mind awareness and hence sales. To get people to keep coming to your site you must provide them with a reason. This can be relevant, frequently changing information, especially if it can be personalized.

Customers now control relationships

In the digital world, there are now customers who have a better relationship with on-line companies (with whom they have no human contact!) than with brick and mortar companies with whom they have a great deal of human contact. This is because they feel more in control of the relationship with the on-line company where they can get the information they want, when they want, rather than relying on some under-trained, under-resourced human salesperson in an offline store. With new technology (such as telephoning from a web site and call centers), even people who want human contact with an on-line organization will shortly be able to achieve that as well.

So whilst there is a danger that human relationships can be neglected on the Internet, this does not have to be the case. In fact, if you are clever you can even provide as good, and for some people, better customer service on-line than in the bricks and mortar world. Therefore, the challenge for all of us is to use the Internet to enhance our customer relationships!