Make it easy for your customers to do business with you

Have you heard of chaitime.com? Unlikely. The company was blink and miss even though it had everything it needed to succeed—it used non-traditional media to build a strong community, spent effectively and worked closely with the youth through colleges in north India, where it was focusing on the startup phase.

Its United Kingdom-based founders, however, decided not to push further as their pockets were not deep enough and they had little patience for the long haul. This was also the time when venture capitalists were yet to turn bullish on India.

The company’s short-lived stint holds a big lesson—if you are not offering any immediate value to your customers, you must be ready for the long haul.

On the other hand, another similar venture thought it had deep pockets and could change the rules on the ground. Another major lesson for us—innovation for the sake of innovation is stupidity. It has to be truly unique in a meaningful way, based on some insights not just using one’s muscle power to buy the front page for an advertisement. This company, too, vanished in quick time.

Sify.com was no different. They ventured into every possible area from chemicals to chat and youth. They spent a fortune in a campaign no one could make head and tail of. Remember the Lover No1, Girlfriend No1 and so on campaigns?

Most prospects could not get an idea of what these ads were talking about in comparison to Rediff.com’s simpler and straightforward ads. Were Sify ads trying to say that Sify was No1 by association? What a lousy way to make a connection.

The goal is still the same

One thing is clear from all these failed ventures. The web changes almost everything except the people your company works hard to get: customers. That is the bottom line. Once you understand this everything falls in place, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources.

Buyers are sellers. Products are services. Markets have been turned inside out but one thing about doing business in the new economy has not changed—the fundamental goal of a company is to serve its customers.

Companies may be working faster, smarter, harder and in more unusual ways than before but they must also work with customers better than they did in the old economy or there will not be any economics in play for sure.

My friend and once business partner Patricia Seybold in her book Customers.com has turned the excitement about e-commerce on its head by focusing on the most important URL of all: www.yourcustomers.com.

As a tech industry veteran, as the founder and CEO of the Patricia Seybold Group, a consultancy based in Boston, and as the co-author of a series of five books on professional computing, Patty knows what it takes to develop a customer-centric organisation, one that is capable of navigating the multimedia world of web, email, digital, voice mail and traditional media.

Seybold has several case studies in her book to illustrate eight core principles of doing business in the digital space. Here are a few pointers to making it easy for your customers to do business with you:

Self-service is the ultimate service

Customers value control over their time. They want to place an order, check on a shipment, or get help whenever they feel like it, and through any of several media—phone, web, email, chatbot, or even direct human contact.

Giving customers multiple choices to get the information they want will save you money and build loyalty in the long term. Every week, for example, more than 25,000 Dell customers check the status of their order on the company's website, saving the firm eight dollars every time a customer substitutes a mouse click for a phone call.

Experience is the message

Your brand is nothing less than the complete experience of doing business with you. It includes the experience of using your products but it extends beyond that point. Enhancing the customer's experience means eliminating snags and friction, and finding ways to reduce customer anxiety.

For example, Amazon lets repeat customers buy items with just one click of the mouse and within a few minutes of ordering, customers receive an email notification confirming their order. The process is easy, and it reduces customer anxiety. This has become the norm for most e-commerce businesses today but Amazon is way ahead in customer experience management.

Help customers help each other 

There are people who know the answer to your customers' questions better than you do—other customers.

A smart company will figure out how to let its customers talk to others with whom they have something in common. It builds an organic, self-propagating community.

For example, Microsoft uses its website to organise meeting places around customers' jobs—CIO, CTO, and developer. Cisco Systems has found that people using its customer-support website excel at helping one another and often provide answers faster than the Cisco support staff do.