We now live in an ‘on-demand’ economy where customers are demanding flexibility, personalisation and responsiveness. The days are gone when just producing amazing products or services was enough. Nowadays, it’s all about relationships and being more ‘relationship centric’ and providing ongoing value.
Companies such as Amazon, Airbnb and Uber have raised the bar so high for what customers expect that so many companies end up seeing sales rapidly decline because they haven’t kept up with the ever-changing and constant emerging trends and advancements in technology. The main reasons for businesses failing in this on-demand economy are:
- The introduction of new digital business models
- Innovation in industries
- Companies failing in their strategy for digital transformation
- Not ‘relationship centric’ enough
This opens up opportunities for more smaller, agile and innovative companies entering the market.
Are you providing ongoing value to your customers? If so, how are you doing this? In order to meet customers on-demand expectations you need to be ensuring you deliver on the following:
Ongoing Value
You can provide ongoing value to your customers through some of the following ways:
- Loyalty programs
- Discounts
- Thought leadership content to provide customers with great insight into your products and services
- Existing customers offers
Superior Customer Experience
To ensure your site’s user experience is on point you need to identify your visitor’s behaviour through the analytics software you have installed on your site whether that is Google Analytics or some other. You can then map the user journey that will provide your customer with a memorable shopping experience. Remember to make sure that:
- Icons and CTAs are labelled and easy to decipher
- The site loads quickly
- It’s slick and easy to use on mobile devices
- It’s easy to navigate
- Copy is simple, concise and clear
- You provide a seamless omni-channel experience
Fulfilment
Amazon have set a precedent for on-demand customer fulfilment and for the smaller enterprises to compete with them it’s a gargantuan task. However, the task is there so all you can do now is learn quickly and adapt to what best fits your business model. There are plenty of technologies out there who can at least allow you to be much more competitive such as Temando a Magento extension which helps streamline your fulfilment process as well as help increase conversions on your checkout page.
Start looking at how you can make your fulfilment process more time and cost effective for the business. Draw a process diagram of the whole process and speak to each member of the team to gain feedback on where they think improvements can be made in the process. A bit crazy I know but act as the ‘purchased item’ in the fulfilment process and go through every stage of the process as this will give you a better understanding of how efficient the process is and where the holes are.
Anytime, Real-time
One of the most important parts of building a strong on-demand offering is ensuring you provide customers with an engaging mobile experience. Firstly you need to make sure your website is responsive and fully optimised for mobile.
Customers spend most of their time shopping on mobile so if this experience is poor you will lose out on sales or even worse lose existing customers.
The mobile user journey needs to be slick and intuitive and it needs to allow the customer to easily browse, navigate and purchase as easy as it is on a desktop computer. You also need to be there for your customers to interact with them in real-time. You can use chat support software such as Zendesk Chat to offer real-time support.
Personalisation
Personalisation is key to customer retention and it ensures customers receive a more relevant and pleasurable shopping experience. To get personalisation right you need to:
- Refer to the interaction history with your customers
- Provide your customers with gestures of goodwill
- Recognise what your customers want
- Build an emotional connection with your customers
- Gain customer feedback as feedback is essential
- Personalise as much as possible along every step of the customer’s journey.
You need to ensure there is a big focus on these areas in your eCommerce strategy to ensure you keep ahead of your competitors and position yourself as a more ‘relationship centric’ company.
Need help crafting a successful ‘on demand’ experience for your customers? Talk to our consultants today!
