Business-to-Consumer

From start to finish, the experience is the only thing that matters. If you look at best practice today, it’s possible to do business online, in stores, in person, and by catalog. A company should be fairly seamless across its touch points.

Online, no transaction is tangible. There’s no friendly greeter at the front door, and there’s no help desk at the back of the store.

Customer service is the online experience.

There’s a big difference between owning a lot of data about customers and owning the customer experience.

In many ways that runs counter to what online companies have long pointed to as evidence of their success. Visitors, eyeballs, traffic — this is the stuff online companies often cite as indicators of their popularity.

Instead of focusing on how many shoppers are visiting your site, look at what they’re doing when they get there.

Do they abandon their shopping carts when they get to the shipping charges? Do they leave the site if they have to browse through too many screens to find what they’re looking for?

Alot of it is about going back to basics. Am I serving the customer? Are we making them happy?

On the Web, a customer is in a self-service environment. So retailers must know what the customer wants before she tells them. Sites must be intuitive and accessible — to get a customer to click because she’s engaged, not because she’s confused.