Monday 13 July 2009

On line businesses still need to talk off line

What an interesting weekend. I actually met a few of our customers. I've emailed plenty, phoned quite a few, skyped a couple but apart from family and friends this weekend was the first time I met some real life customers and had a good old chat.

In an on line world us non techy types can find ourselves busy trying to learn techniques and skills to "maximise" this and "optimise" that. Everyday we find ourselves thinking about landing pages, cpc, long tail keywords and the like.

Having spoken with real customers, real humans who'd used our website to get quotes and find out more I realised I've been fooling myself a bit. I thought we had been having dialogue with customers. We created a warranty quote systems so people could just get a price without leaving tonnes of personal information or having to speak to a commission hungry telesales person. We've done surveys and follow up calls/emails. We ask for recommendations and encourage people to write in with their experiences. However talking to one lovely, slighter more mature lady, I discovered we have been busy talking and not listening and worse than that, talking electronically to a person who wanted to speak to a person.

This lady has bought a warranty plan from us. She was happy with the price, pleased with the level of cover and had actually found our on line quote system easy to use. However she nearly hadn't. She had read the information, understood it but just wanted to be sure she'd understood it properly.

Our online sales process almost failed with this lady. Once she had bought her warranty plan we treated like a real customer. We made sure she had what she needed and was clear with how her plan would be administered and how to contact us. In turn she now is in our contact cycle so we'll be keeping in touch with her. However while she was only a virtual client we had only been virtually there for her.

So at this fabulous lady's suggestion we've added a simple "call me back" option at the point a customer tries to get their quote.

One real conversation on Saturday with a real person has lead to a real solution by Monday morning. All I can say is "Thank you Mrs Kelly"

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