April 17 2008

Opinion - Are You Being Served?

The web needs to go back to the customer service given by the old fashioned corner shop rather than the high street superstore says Malcolm Duckett VP Marketing and Operations at, Speed-Trap

To give customers individual treatment, the web needs to move full circle and stop treating customers as groups or demographics, and take their lead from the corner shop, suggests Malcolm Duckett VP Marketing and Operations at customer insight provider, Speed-Trap.

If web marketers were asked to name a shining example of how they want their brands to treat customers online, they would likely be able to repeat a shortlist of companies they believe offer a trusted brand name on the web and boast a subscriber or customer base that are the envy of their competitors.

There may be a good example of quality service in there somewhere but here’s another far more fertile hunting ground – the corner shop. Every town or village has got them and they could teach web marketers a thing or two about how to treat their customers as individuals. Walk into a local grocery store and chances are the owner will know you by name, know what you normally like, what you bought last time you were in, what they had run out of but now have got back in stock and what new products are available which you should try.

The problem with the web is that as a global phenomenon where huge numbers are what impress, companies are treating people like homogenous groups. But people are not groups, they are individuals.

If you start to treat your customers as individuals and notice what they like and what product decisions they are making, the chances are you will be able to sell them more goods by simply recommending what they are most likely looking for, particularly if at discount in appreciation of their returning custom. If you were in a local shop and you were looking through the coat rack and the owner asked you if you were interested in exterior paint, you’d be taken aback, but exactly this kind of untargeted and inappropriate promotion is a daily occurrence online.

If you know your customer as well as a corner shop would, you can upsell to them. If someone is on your web site looking for a toaster and you know they have previously been looking at a kettle, then it makes sense to offer them a bundle deal.

Mind you, whilst this historic process can work, it can be misleading. Companies need to invest in the technology that will enable their sites to establish what a person is doing in real time today, now. Their recommendations based on previous visits and interest may be appropriate most of the time, but not always, and a lack of appreciation of customers’ changing needs or motives will result in the same untargeted approaches as before.

A classic example of where this historic approach can go wrong is booking flights and hotels. If you have previously booked a single return to Frankfurt with a city centre hotel for the night, the site naturally assumes you are a person who books business trips. There is nothing wrong with that but where marketers are letting themselves down is not realising that business people are individuals with home lives too. So, if that same person who normally books overnight stopovers in Frankfurt comes on the site and starts looking at flights for four people to Malaga or Florida, the site needs to realise that person is in a very different buying mode.

So, if I’m buying just flights, for four, the site needs to be asking itself, where is this customer’s family staying; how will they get there and what will they do once they are there? Perhaps the site could even suggest how the visitor’s airmiles – which have been logged all the while – could be factored into the booking. If the site is not treating me as an individual it will probably offer me a business hotel because of my history, and it may or may not offer me a hire car but it almost certainly won’t offer me a family-sized car with a big boot and a child seat or two – resulting in massive missed opportunities, especially if the prospective customer leaves the site for a competitor’s, exasperated by the lack of correct offers.

This is where it really pays to build up a 360 degree view of each customer and invest in the technology to find out who a person is when they come on to the site, what they have shown interest in previously and, crucially, what are they interested in today?

This development of an online one-to-one instead of one–to-many customer relationship approach needs a real time view of the customer that and can allow companies to leap further ahead of competition by combining their online storefront with associated interactions with their customers on other channels, such as in-store and through a call centre.

But the obvious question any marketer is going to ask is how do I know who each individual is when they arrive at the site? A lot of analytics and marketing companies will extol the virtues of cookies and IP tracking. But neither can be relied upon solely.

Cookies can get you a long way, particularly now most are first party rather than third party, but all they show is that you have returned to a site and they will help the site track the pages you are looking at. What use is this? You can’t upsell to a page, only to the person viewing it, and cookies alone can not provide enough information to do this.

Cookies share another problem with IP tracking. It is not uncommon for a person to start researching a purchase at work but book or buy at home in the evening on a different computer, or vice versa. By investing in the technology that can adapt to identify someone and establish that there are previous records which must be taken into account from other sources, and crucially, combine these with the details of the current visit, upselling can become an effective possibility.

This leap forward in marketing and customer service can only be made if marketing departments are brave enough to realise that numbers, and old ones at that, are not the be all and end all. Only when you understand each customer and their immediate motives and can serve them as an individual can you really start to increase basket size and drive repeat custom. People like to be recognised and have apt products suggested to them just as they like the guy running the corner shop recognising them and saying hello. Every advertising campaign, irrespective of the size of the company, hinges on appealing to the individual – why is this emphasis not shared when it comes to the approach taken to online customers?

By going full circle and applying the personal local corner shop approach to an online global audience, marketers can move away from grouping people together and making assumptions on past purchases and instead use real-time activity analysis to enable them to target the right customer at the right time with the right product.

Web retailers must stop seeing visitors as nothing more than anonymous shoppers and restricting themselves to only considering historical purchase data. Online customers must be regarded as individual people, just as they are when they visit high street branches or the corner shop. A customer is not just a folder of past purchases – old information is just that, old. By utilising the available real-time technology that allows retailers to pro-actively and accurately target and attend to online visitors during their actual visits, shopping baskets can be converted into real sales and more importantly, later refilled.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)