Customer Service Lessons in Web-enabled world

Customers are increasingly getting more spoilt for choice thanks to the forever growing range of purchase options and changing lifestyle necessities. All this makes it very difficult for monitoring all the changes and predicting the impact of scores of new trends. Often these force new service compulsions that may put a sudden burden on your stretched staff and finances. For example in these recession hit days, travelers are demanding low cost travel options where discounted travel fare is insufficient. Hence the tour operator has to discover new vacation destinations, cheaper travel option and even cheaper stay destinations without compromising on the quality of experience and travel safety. For this you need to strike low cost deals with your regular hospitality service partners (hotels, restaurants, transporters) without reducing the overall quality of the travel experience. Every vendor in the customer value chain may need to be convinced by you to reduce his profit margins to sustain the traffic volume of tourists. Like low cost hotels could offer shared bus service for guided tours instead of exclusive cabs, while they continue to provide free meals (buffet) and airport pickup and drop facility (again shared bus-trip). Customer intimacy through innovative ‘more-value-for-less’ service packages is key to sustaining better customer loyalty. You can easily collaborate to outsmart bigger competitors, thereby ensuring customer loyalty dividends continue to accrue to you. Additionally you could use growing number of customer referrals to get more business by using real customer testimonials on your website and e-mailers/direct mailers to mailing lists created with active help from delighted customers. This way you will not only spread the good word (customers helping their friends to get the best travel deals) for enhancing their reputation but also significantly reduce your marketing and sales costs (while increasing its effectiveness). These sales effort cost savings can be passed on to further reduce the price of your offerings to make you even more price competitive in difficult times ( a friend in need is a friend indeed!).

Global competition, Local Problems-Thanks to the web, global businesses are now accessible to their customers on a 24X7 basis. It is no longer sufficient for you to be the best business in the local area, as you now have to compete with the world’s best in terms of products as well as customer service innovations e.g. online ordering e-commerce facility for your local clothes boutique. Free trade capitalism is tearing down trade barriers and technology is making even distant global businesses available locally. Thus customers around the world are now flooded by a growing array of competing products and servicing options: all at bargain pricing. Internet savvy customers of today are more spoilt for choice and usually choose the best price and product options. You now need to constantly enhance you web-presence to ensure that its content is regularly updated and local USPs are properly leveraged. For example customers love local availability of urgent service providers like chemist stores. Not mentioning your local address (with area code), telephone numbers and extended business hours could easily kill your many local availability advantages as your website may not show up in local searches in popular search engines. Local SEO of your website is thus a necessity that you need to implement on your business website to sustain higher customer loyalty. For if you’re not there when a customer needs to reach you, how can he be loyal to you? When any of your local contact details change (telephone number, cell phone, additional phone numbers, e-mail IDs, and URLs), you should promptly inform your regular customer base and also update these facts on your website. Keeping your customers in the dark about new changes can harm your business.

-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net