Posted by arlene

Further interactivity

Any enhancement to interactivity is to be applauded. Providing voice chat for instance will increase the duration of an e-customer’s visit to your site from under 30 seconds to an average stay of 40 minutes.

Voice chat has also been shown to increase the conversion of browsing to buying. It helps to tackle the 65% of e-customers who give up the ordering process just before purchasing. Speaking to someone at that point is crucial in getting their business — you need someone empathetic and knowledgeable to discuss it all through with the e-customer.

If you know who they are via the initial details, you can even provide a closer match to the e-customer’s age, gender and education profile. It’s a superb trick to suddenly be speaking to someone your own age and gender who is knowledgeable and prepared to answer all your questions.

Web cams offer a cute way of opening up your world to theirs. A useful further means of building some kind of happy relationship between e-customer and business. They can show what is happening in the office, factory, shop or club. Everyone loves to peak and a web cam gives them that ability.

Equally, the web cam can be used to provide two-way visual communication. It’s a cool feature to offer. It costs very little. It allows the e-customer to play with his own toys without having to hang out in public web chat rooms that are so often unpoliced and open to the advances of the dodgy and depraved.

Providing online product tracking is a hot sticky feature because it reinforces so many other messages. It’s fun to watch the progress of your order as it works its way through the system. It’s impressive to track it as it travels across countries all the way to the e-customer’s door.

At the same time it underlines the control and value of the service and provides a fantastic opportunity for the e-customer to show off such a great feature via his phone, TV or PC. It also reduces the number of calls made ‘just to check that it is on its way’.

Customers like to customize

It appears that one of the strongest urges of 21st-century man is to customize. He can’t get enough of individuality no matter how vile, trivial or tacky. Screen savers. Wallpaper. Wacky mobile phone covers. Sites dedicated to downloadable images and ringing tones to reflect your personality just a little more closely.⁵⁷

It’s an up and coming trend in the e-customer’s world. Providing the ability to change the colours, styles of images, the news that is shown, the greeting that is shown as you enter the site or a thousand other features. It’s hot stuff. It keeps the e-customer playing around with your site. He is taking up the challenge to ‘make himself feel at home‘. And when your site becomes more like home the e-customer is likely to stick around.

The e-customer can already choose to redecorate his software with what are known as skins. New web browsers and many of the cooler software applications will have the ability to customize the look and feel of many features.

You can provide your own skins either featuring your own logo or corporate colours for the e-customer to customize his browser, and make them available on your site. Or you can provide skins that allow your own site to be customized. A bank, for example, that is coloured to look like the e-customer’s favourite sports team — Citibank in Chicago Bulls colours and images. This kind of stuff wows whole sections of the e-customer world. And the cynics secretly play with it as well.

Creating an experience that allows the e-customer to do what he needs to while inviting him to stay and play a while. That’s the essence of the approach. Electronic channels provide endless diversions that could not be provided easily in the real world. Cool links, fun stuff to try out, bizarre facts, calculators, product reviews, news, animations, free stuff, stuff to send to your friends, bargains and innovations.

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