In any business it’s important to understand your customers. When planning, it’s necessary to come up with buyer personas based on who you think your customers are going to be. These give you a good indication of how you should design your site, the branding you’ll use in terms of tone of voice, color and more. Getting into the customer’s mind and determining what they really want though is something that’s not quite as straightforward.
This holds true for all products and customers across every industry. So it’s not enough to hold focus groups, or ask customers to complete surveys, as they’re pretty fickle and because they don’t really know what they want either now or in the future, asking them outright is not going to return the best results. If you can’t ask the customer outright though, you still need to gain information and discover more about them, so what are the best ways of going about this?
1. Study Analytics
Every business with a web presence should make regular use of Google Analytics and this is even truer of eCommerce sites. Analytics can tell you all kinds of things, including where your site visitors are arriving from and how they behave once they’ve landed on the site. It also allows you to remarket your products to previous customers and much more.
You can gain a lot of insight through the use of Analytics. For example, one area in which eCommerce sites are always interested is the rate at which its visitors abandons the shopping cart. Analytics allow you to delve further into where the customer has been on the site to prompt the abandonment.
Perhaps they have left when delivery prices have been shown, for example, or when they realize that they have to pay tax on top. This can help you to tweak your pricing and the steps to checkout to suit the customer. Transparency around pricing especially helps to increase trust which in turn creates loyal customers who will spread the word about your site.
2. Communicate with Your Customers
Many businesses like to think that they’re customer focused but few actually are. If you really want to get into the mind of your customer and find out what they really want then the first step is in listening to them and collecting data. Your customer service will no doubt take the form of phone calls, email, instant chat and possibly, SMS. All of the communications that you receive from customers should be collated and studied in order to gain insight into their needs.
You may find that the most commonly asked questions on instant chat surround certain products for example, or are around delivery and pricing. You might discover that people use chat to ask certain questions, but only use the phone or email to make a complaint (which will tell you things about behavior).
IM is the perfect tool for discovering more about your customer and their needs as it allows you to have a conversation with the customer in real-time, whilst they’re on the site and looking to make a purchase. If it gets to an email, then the customer is potentially lost and if it gets to a phone call then it’s likely that the customer has become frustrated and may not be quite so receptive.
3. Training is Key
Often customers use live chat to find out more about the products that they’re thinking about buying. This means that you should train staff to know about the products that you sell. Of course, if you have 100s of products, then this is unfeasible, but you should at least pick out the most popular and arm your reps with plenty of knowledge.
You should also provide data sheets where possible; these can be stored in a central repository in order to ensure that the customer service rep can find them quickly and easily. Training is also necessary to teach your reps how to say no without offending, and how to search for similar products that the customer is looking for when online. Information should be easy to find so that the impact of chat isn’t lost whilst the customer waits for the operative to find the right information.
4. Planning is Essential
There’s no hard and fast rules surrounding how you should structure your questions to discover more about your customers as it will depend heavily on your audience. However, when conversing with customers via live chat, it’s often the case that questions will arise naturally throughout the conversation. You should, as discussed, keep a record of these so that you’re able to put training in place to address them. You should arm your customer service reps with as much information as possible and you should ensure that they know how to structure questions so that they a) require an answer and b) are well received by the customer.
Getting it right does require some research, planning and training, but this will ensure that you’re making the most out of your communications channels and all being well, are doing it better than the competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment