Conversations & Interactions Build Relationships
Turn Website Users into Loyal Customers by Building Relationships
Have you connected with your customers?
If a customer comes to your store, your workshop, or the office of your company you’ll try to help them and most certainly you will do everything to make their stay enjoyable for them. Whether you’re a shop owner, an artisan, a craftsman you will most likely interact with your customers and be building a real relationship. Those relationships create a real loyalty. That loyalty leads to trusting you and your product, repeat purchases, them referring friends, providing you with great feedback, forgiving mistakes…
When you contrast this kind of interaction with your customers and the relationships you build with them, with how you do business online nowadays: Now that is very different, isn’t it? With your online business you never met your customers. You have no relationships with your customers. You might have met some of them, but have you ever really connected with them?
Communicating Online is a Pain
Relationships are about knowing the other you’re in a relationship with. For online interactions this mostly is broken. Much hints for these broken relationships having a systemic cause. Techcrunch recently titled that “HTML Killed Ecommerce” blaming the technology itself for being the cause: How you have to use websites disintermediates the users already. On eCommerce sites your customers are forced to find and click a series of static pages to get answers to your product. Rob LoCascio puts it this way: “[…] retail stores aren’t libraries, and the library format can’t be applied to online stores either. Customers need a way to dynamically answer the questions that enable them to make purchases.” Customers visit a website to get answers, educate themselves, and compare. But the rising phone calls at contact centers (268 billion calls per year at a cost of 1.6 trillion USD) suggests that most of your customers get lost somewhere along the process, just confused, or annoyed with your website and leave or have to call.
Modern conversational applications tap into that inner understanding about how the way things get done in the real world: through conversations. Eoghan McCabe of Intercom puts online conversation in context to the consumerization of software: “Consumers nowadays have amazingly personal apps to communicate, like Snapchat and WhatsApp and Facebook and video messaging where they can send and broadcast and communicate.” Online communication should focus on the end user as an individual consumer, in contrast with the earlier era of only organization-oriented offerings (Def. of consumerization). Because, most of the tools you use for online business are still the big, clunky, old-school tools compared to those consumer-centric ones. They are not the kind of tool that you would want choose if you want to connect with your customers. “Fill out that form”, Helpdesks, FAQs, emails from marketing automation, and “customer experience” software that respond with
“Dear valued customer, thanks for your inquiry”,
“Your request is added to the queue”,
“We typically reply within 30 minutes”,
“This ticket will automatically close in 5 business days.”
Could you imagine a store owner, an artisinal shop, a local business saying that to their customers? You would never say that to your customers!
Have True Conversations
If you look at all the different areas where you connect with your customers and communicate with your customers: Where would you be most willing to invest? You’d probably invest in
(1) the first impression and
(2) getting the customer to a first result fast, right?
Something that allows you to immediately getting to know your customers, to immediately start building relationships with your customers.
You’re probably thinking of chat-bots right now. Everybody is talking about “chat-bots” and “conversational marketing”. They are a great start to overcome the conversational restrictions you experience online. But true conversations are more than just answering questions. Could you imagine the next time you meet with a friend to just restrict yourself asking questions about how their life is going? Chat-robots are very one-dimensional conversational applications. They are missing the two way-effect of related actions, the higher qualities dimensions of interaction and interactivity.
Make Quality Interactions
There is more to getting “a question answered”. Communication is so much more than just getting our questions answered. Communication deeply roots in interaction. There is something innate to our psychology in getting our questions answered through a conversation that instills the confidence in us to spend money. But customers tend to buy even more if you can build trust over a series of different quality interactions. Interactivity is such a quality or condition of interaction. And interestingly you can sell more even if your customers don’t use the interaction channels you provide them with at all. Just because they see how you care about your customers and knowing that if in the case they’d need you, they’ll be able to get help, they are willing to spend more and perceive you as more trustworthy.
You want your customers to have a real experience so you can start building a relationship with them. There’s nothing like looking at pictures of the ocean or Disneyland or going to and experiencing the ocean/Disneyland yourself. You want your customer being part of the story and not just the persona that is being sold to.
Build Relationships
So when overcoming the hurdles of building relationships with your customers online keep in mind that communication is a two way street. You want them to learn about you and your products. You want to answer their questions and educate if your solution is the right fit for them. You want to learn about your customers as much as possible: Nothing is more valuable than to observe your customers interacting with your products, knowing for what they will use it for, exploring what they value most…
Communication and interaction builds relationship and trust, making eCommerce successful.
There can be a better way for Internet businesses to communicate with their customers. To engage, get insights, and to connect. Coshape Customizer do exactly that; they allow your customers to directly interact with your products, to start a conversation right there on your website. And while you communicate with your customers you learn about them. Their want and needs become the basis of your sales and production processes, making it a seamless end-to-end communication process from customer to sales and marketing to engineering and product design to production and fulfillment.
Recap
- Relationships are build through the means of conversations. A conversation is more than getting your questions answered. It is interactions and building trust, seeing you interact with other customers and your community, finding out about your customers and guiding them if needed.
- The old, constraint way of clicking through pages, configurators, etc. like you would with a book in library is disengaging your customers.
- Communication and interaction builds relationship and trust, making eCommerce successful.
