Posted by arlene

Of course excellent service is desirable but to deliver it requires a holistic understanding of what is in the mind of the e-customer. The answers coming back from research into the behavior of thousands of e-customers make it clear that excellence is a multifaceted concept. It involves many different components.

It became an anthem for political movements including civil rights and feminism. Many e-customers now sing the chorus incessantly, if silently. When online they feel their rights more keenly.

It’s no good faking it. Respect comes from a profound interest in the e-customer as an individual. As a real person. As an equal. He doesn’t come into your store or your interactive TV channel begging you to serve him. That doesn’t mean he is always confident. It means that he will not stand being put off, postponed, lied or condescended to.

Another criteria for achieving excellence is access. The easier it is to do business with you the more popular you will be. When the e-customer is under pressure he does not like to find that you are ‘closed after 5 pm’ or uncontactable using the channel that he has available.

So stay open longer, even if it is for emergency only help. This does not need to be expensive if it utilizes outsourced call answering and automated e-mail answering services. The e-customer will not always use the best channel for you but if you make him feel that you are always there for him he will make the extra cost worth your while.

The e-customer also wants ’second mile service‘ in such circumstances. He does not want be told that it’s against the rules, or that it is too late, or that there is nothing that can be done. He may not be completely unreasonable but dealing with him may feel like it.

Electronic systems tend to be built to follow rules and instructions that are quite rigid. They have seldom been written to cope with exceptions. This means that they usually only go the first mile. They do what is expected and nothing more.

Your challenge is to design processes that allow exceptions to be made in support of the e-customer so that they really get what they want to pay for. It’s the best way of ensuring that they continue to pay. This most often means letting those pesky people back into the process to cope with additional demands. But it also means allowing flexibility in the technology platforms that support such requests and in the guidelines that encourage people to go out on a limb for an e-customer.

There will be many moments of truth along the way that give you the opportunity to impress the e-customer. To show that you are on his side. You need to be ready to make the most of them. You can even go further and create such occasions by setting the promise deliberately lower than the ability to deliver.

This means planning what we can call lour-day weeks’ for systems and people — to allow slack in the system and then actively seek ways of using it up in delivering miracles to your e-customers.

Every problem is an opportunity for a business. Many existing .com ideas were inspired by the difficulties that their founders have had with real-world and virtual-world services. Unfortunately the ideas do not solve problems that are valuable enough or the service would have been better delivered.

Imagine how you could sell the service via advertising. Think through whether you can explain succinctly the benefits that your service will bring. If you cannot explain it then it is unlikely to sell itself.

Unless of course you would choose not to explain the benefits of anaesthetic to a patient awaiting surgery. Check with your colleagues. You may have found a fantastic idea and lack the eloquence to explain it.

To serve the e-customer you should not be a technologist or an accountant at heart. Let those guys do what they do. Those people should be serving you while you figure out a way of serving the end e-customer. You need to get the bits together and assemble them into useful stuff that the e-customer will actually want to use.

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