Customer is the King or Queen.That is even more so in this Internet Age where customer experience can getshared easily using social media. The establishment of relationship with thecustomer starts the moment he includes a few items in his shopping cart of thee-commerce store.Once the customer selects items and make payment, the order issupposed to have been captured. The order details along with items purchased,quantity, delivery address and any special instructions like gift wrapping orpre-defined time of delivery are to be provided to the fulfillment team. Basedon the type of payment - cash on delivery or pre-paid - the process differs fordelivery of items purchased.
The moment order is placed, the customer would be keen to receivethem as per the delivery dates promised by the vendor. There must be a provision for the customer to track his orders on thee-commerce site where he purchased the items. Sites like Flipkart, owingto their own delivery services, provides that mechanism on their site itself.In cases like Indiatimes Shopping, the delivery status can be verified by usingthe tracking number associated with the 3rd party courier service (likeBluedart or Dhelivery) mentioned in the Order. For a customer, it does notmatter how the delivery happens as long as it happens in time. For e-commercecompanies, the operations to support delivery forms the backbone.
Whether the customer experiencehas been good or bad, it must be captured in asystem for critical analysis later. The issuescould be about payments, shipping or the item itself. Any immediateproblems must be addressed with a sense of urgency. Customers in India (notsure about global space) are sensitive about payment issues, even if the amountinvolved is small. So issues like double charge for the same Order, refund ofmoney in case of credit-card payments for Order cancellations or issues relatedto discount must be addressed immediately. Otherwise, the risk of losing that customer and hence his entire network ofonline buying family and friends looms large at the e-commerce vendor. My badexperience in shopping with Indiatimes was effectively addressed by thecompany.
Once the customer is happy with his overall experience on ane-commerce store, he is going to come back again. The entire e-commerce business hinges on acquiring large numbers of suchcustomers, who provide repeat business. Hence, it is very important tokeep track of such customers and provide benefits to them for theirloyalty. I have not seen any e-commercestore in India offering any substantial loyalty services. Or maybe I have notcome across one so far.
But, information about new products, special discounts, pre-launchoffers and clearance sales needs to be dispatched to all the customers onregular basis to keep the touch-point with themalive.
Needless to say, e-commerce companies must rely on informationtechnology for all the above CRM needs. Customer,order, shipping, payment and feedback information gets stored in appropriatedatabase. Huge amounts of this data can be moved to data warehouses andanalyzed for business insights.
E-mail, Chat and Voice Support arethe primary channels through which customer communicates with thee-commerce company. One key aspect in providing support to the end-customers isto integrate all these channels at the back-end. Irrespective of the channels Iuse - this could be many for an issue with the same order - to complain aboutan Order, it must be resolved.
If you are an end-customer - did you get that wonderful experiencefrom that e-commerce store?
If you are an e-commerce company - could you acquire and retaincustomer and improve the loyalty base over a period of time through CRM?
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