Cultivating customer loyalty is a priority for dot-com sites
June 13-19, 2000.Strategic marketing
By Judy Bishop
For e-business to attract or retain online customers, management of the customer experience is fundamental, and often elusive. Online companies are drowning in an ocean of data -- it can be a nightmare for companies to identify what works and what does not.
Two Vancouver companies offer new tools to help e-businesses make sense of the shadowy traces left by online customers and prospects.
Digital Conversations is the new customer intelligence offering from Simba Digital Conversations. It provides a means to collect and analyze Internet interactions from Web sites, e-mail, search engines and chat rooms into a single, meaningful "digital conversation" between an e-business and online visitor.
This tool is designed to allow marketers to fully listen to customers, interpret their responses and respond to customers quickly in a new, useful way. Further, the result of these digital conversations is expected to be the integration of communications with back-end relationship management systems for a clearer view of the customer. In turn, this should lead to a clear picture of customer value and behaviour and, ultimately, to more effective marketing and sales campaigns. Simba Digital Conversations is a new division of 10-year-old Simba Technologies, a leader in business intelligence. Its recent acquisition by Pivotal Software means that Digital Conversations technology is available stand-alone or integrated with Pivotal eRelationship solutions.
ResponseTek also offers useful new tools. Many of us know this scenario: We register to shop online and purchase something. The product arrives damaged and the billing is wrong. Typically, you make phone calls to sort it out, or send some e-mail. One phone call typically requires others, and the e-mail often bounces around before reaching the right person. You have little feedback on how the company deals with your issue, if at all. This sort of slow, time-consuming and unsatisfactory consumer experience has given many online vendors a bad name, with costly results.
Enter the Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution for e-business by year-old Reponsetek, in final testing and scheduled for an August launch. Targeted at young e-businesses with neither the time nor resources to manage complex customer experience issues, CEM is meant to set a new standard in online customer service. The CEM solution meets the need for specific, timely information about an online customer's experience and delivers a transparent issue resolution process. The idea is to make it easy for people to buy, provide feedback and stay loyal, and for companies to understand and address changing customer needs. ResponseTek's customer experience improvements start with a customer clicking a Web site's "feedback" button, and flows through to real-time reports for the company -- down to the performance of individual business operations.
ResponseTek believes that such online management tools can provide an early warning system to address business issues before they start damaging a company's financial performance. They help management of online companies collect customer data, track their issues from complaint to resolution and let the customer see exactly how the problem is resolved.
CEO Syed Hasan explained: "We're trying to eliminate the 'black hole' of customer service, from a customer perspective. That's when you provide feedback on an online experience, but from that point on, you're at the mercy of that organization's efficiency to keep you in the loop about how they're dealing with your issue.
"We want to turn that process inside-out and give consumers the power to be able to trace issues as they're being resolved, then make a loyalty decision based on what they see."
An analogy would be the way FedEx enables customers to track a parcel online anytime in its shipping process, and gives the customer the power to make decisions. Hasan's product's genesis was straightforward. While working with e-commerce clients for a major U.S. consulting firm, Hasan saw a need for technology to quickly convert masses of online data into information that was useful and relevant to a management team.
"Despite powerful front-end software, the back-end was often a paper-based system that was only revised monthly. Management couldn't digest and act on information, so they couldn't impact the next customer based on what they'd learned from the previous customer."
Judy Bishop is principal of strategic marketing at KPMG's Information, Communications & Entertainment Group. Some companies mentioned in her column may be KPMG clients. She is also a director of the B.C. Technology Industries Association. E-mail her at judybishop@kpmg.ca. Her column appears monthly and her opinions are her own.
