Grow Your Business

If you don’t have a company website, start asking yourself what business opportunities you are missing. If you do own a website, ask if you are maximizing your website's potential for gaining new customers and for getting new business from existing ones.

Cebu Pacific's online site clearly demonstrates what a website can do to improve customer relations. Without spending extra on additional ticket outlets, office space, and staff hires, the airline is able to sell more. What's also amazingly obvious is that the Web presence is available all day long, with no vacations and holidays. It’s also accessible to tourists and OFWs from everywhere.

Selling stuff online is just one way to benefit from the Web. Websites are also a good way to retain and build relationships with customers. Selling to existing customers is easier and cheaper to do than trying to win new ones. Conversely, losing a customer out of frustration or better competition is going to be expensive and painful for you.

A TOOL FOR IMPROVING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

Companies now use the Web to improve relations with their customers. Most of our local banks now use websites to be more accessible to their customers. Banco de Oro, Metrobank, and Bank of PI now have online sites that allow balance inquiry, money transfers, bills payment—even stock trading (in the case of BPI). With banks offering these conveniences, customers would think twice before switching to the competition.

Insurance companies and other businesses that involve memberships also gain from self-service websites. With the help of a self-service website, the members themselves can see the status of their payments, loan requests, claims, etc. It gives customers a sense of power to be able to find this information for themselves and not have to depend on a distant call-center agent to search for the data.

The same level of technology would be a boost to major local hotels and resorts. But up to now, hotels and resorts in this country still don't conduct real-time online bookings. Their websites are mostly just brochure sites with contact information. Booking in this set-up still entails e-mailing a customer representative, a process that often requires you to send your credit card number through an unsecured email message.

Self-service sections on your website will help improve customer satisfaction. One of the earliest uses of websites was, in fact, to provide a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for confused customers. Schools, gadget companies, and software makers were among the pioneers of FAQs on websites. Users who had trouble using gadgets or software often called by phone to ask for tech support. With the popularity of websites, companies began publishing their own FAQs and redirected their customers to these sites.

Along with FAQs came community forums and knowledge bases—a repository of how-to articles, forum threads, and bits of knowledge culled from online communities. Users could now simply use a search engine to find relevant solutions to their problems. Businesses actually liked the idea of delegating support—at no extra cost—to a community of user-volunteers!

Speaking of communities, it may help if you considered your customers as a community and treat them as co-developers of your product. In your website, you can set up a suggestion box or a wish-list forum where customers can send their ideas. This fosters loyalty and a sense of being part of the development of your product or service.

Haribon Philippines, an environmental organization that relies on membership contributions, realized that it could boost its membership count by improving the content of its website. Now they regularly distribute wallpapers, research papers, and other downloads through their site, thus helping increase members and sustain their interest. Haribon is not a business, of course, but the fact that it recognized the importance of keeping in touch with their members (their customers) and of maximizing this through their website is helping it achieve its organizational goals.

Sometimes, simply putting up forms on your website can be very helpful to harassed customers and will likely generate good customer feedback. Our government agencies like the National Statistics Office and the Department of Foreign Affairs realized that if they put application forms on their websites and couple this with a fast courier service, they would be able to reach the busy people—people who are their customers anyway.

But an even more significant development in Web-based customer relations management is the online contact center. This is a system that rides on the Internet or the Web to integrate various customer-oriented tasks. In this case, a contact center is internal—your customers don't use it. Instead, you use your contact center to help manage your customers.

Says a recent study by Gartner, a US-based IT research and advisory firm: “The contact center, which integrates and synchronizes post-sale customer interactions, is the most critical flashpoint for the customer relationship. A contact center integrates Internet interactions and call center interactions, with the goal of providing a consistent customer experience.”

In short, a major benefit of the contact center is service that wows your customers. You yourself would know what it means to get wowed by service—you are not asked to wait on long lines; someone attends to you quickly, and if your issue is still unresolved, someone gets back to you; you don’t get passed around from one service representative to another; and you feel that the representative is focused on helping solve your issue and you don’t feel abandoned.

One example of a contact center is Salesforce.com. In the simplest sense, Salesforce.com is like a big organization that you could rent to help you manage your sales activities (including pre- and post-sales). You pay a minimal annual fee online (credit cards accepted) and you instantly get a contact database and other features. No need to buy off-the-shelf software or pay a developer to build your own system. And because Salesforce.com is web-based, it’s available everywhere and your army of field agents can use it outside the office.

But do be careful when setting up an online service for customers. If it’s not well designed (as is the case with Philippine Airlines' website, which is difficult to use), it will only frustrate clients.

As the Gartner paper says, “When an enterprise succeeds in satisfying the customer’s intent for the service interaction, the result is a reinforcement of the brand promise. When the interaction fails to meet the customer’s expectations, it costs the enterprise money and credibility.”

Ruben Canlas Jr. is an IT and knowledge consultant. Got a question on IT and your small business? Send it to itmanager@digitalsolutions.ph.

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