The Consumer Association’sWhich Online recently removed two high profile internet businesses - Trainline.com and Jungle.com - from its Web Trader recommended list for repeated failure to deliver fulfilment or address customer complaints.
In these relatively early days of eBusiness, everyone is still finding their way. It is perhaps understandable therefore, that many (if not most) eBusiness websites are configured on the basis of the conversation they want to have with their customers, rather than any conversations their customers might need to hold with them. Understandable this may be, but it simply isn’t going to work in the long term.
Customers often have questions, but websites don’t always provide the answers. Customers sometimes have complaints - for example they have paid for goods but not received them - and few eBusinesses can deal with this effectively online. Sometimes, websites are simply not accessible at all for technical reasons.
In recognition of these issues, the Web Trader accreditation requires the provision of properly staffed and clearly promoted customer helplines. Many internet businesses nevertheless discourage offline contact - on the grounds that this enables them to provide keenest pricing - but the suspicion is that this all too conveniently distances them from their customers when problems arise.
True customer dialogue means allowing two-way communication in all circumstances and about all circumstances. Given the difficulty many internet businesses face in achieving a distinctive positioning in ‘me too’ markets, a strong customer communications safety net could become a highly advantageous point of differentiation. But this is only a start.
Because the web is a passive medium - a highly acclaimed aspect of consumer empowerment - it can easily (and again, sometimes rather conveniently) be assumed that no pro-active communication with customers is required at all. Yet a positive policy towards offline communications where they might be of genuine benefit to customers could do much to build corporate reputation in the new economy.
An example. There are now at least half a dozen online savings banks offering bonus levels of interest, for limited periods, to attract new deposits. How many of them will take the trouble to advise customers (pro-actively, not through small print on the umpteenth layer of the web site) that the end of the bonus period is nigh? Why would they, for goodness sake? Well, perhaps because they’ve already signed up to the idea of brand values different from those of manipulative and exploitative rate-harvesting banks and building societies in the old economy.
As they say, a principle isn’t really a principle unless you’re prepared to take the risk that it will cost you money.
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