To start talking about loyalty, you must first have a relationship, right? Well, it's the same with customers. Customer relationship and loyalty are two concepts that go hand in hand and it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it, when a relationship works: it continues.
Building a stable and lasting relationship with your customer has never been an easy task and if you now add the omnichannel touch... it gets interesting.
The omnichannel customer relationship
Let's forget how easy the customer relationship was in the A.I. era (Before Internet), those years of library to library and in which if someone was late, you had to trust that they had not stood you up... Then came the web page, that little platform from which we began to sell but in small increments and as a complement, because, well, it's something new and you have to be there.
With 22.5 million Spaniards shopping online, eCommerce is no longer a secondary sales channel and we can no longer limit ourselves to a chatbot that asks you how you are or a friendly sales clerk who remembers your size. We need to turn the customer relationship around to personalize and build omnichannel loyalty.
The era of the omni-channel customer is beginning, yes, that customer who searches online and buys in store, who sees something in a shop window and searches online, who buys online and picks it up in store... customers have become experts at jumping from channel to channel, so the customer relationship has to be able to do the same.
"The customer's perception is your reality" Kate Zabriskie
How to improve the relationship with your customers
Let's face it, it's not your first round on eCommerce, so we won't waste time talking about emotional marketing, returns management, loyalty cards or email marketing.
It seems unbelievable, but we often get obsessed with looking for the three feet of the cat and forget to apply the most basic and overwhelming logic. Listen and observe.
In the relationship with your offline customer the store managers are the experts in listening and observing and in the online world you have to listen and observe the data collected by your digital tools. If you don't have a digital solution to help you with this you can try Wapping, Openbravo or Zeus to have all your data at your fingertips and in real time.
Don't be afraid to map your customer's experience.
If the experience is good, the customer is happy and the relationship flows, but if the experience is a nightmare, the site has poor navigability and no different delivery options to choose from... you know.
It sounds simple, but something as simple as putting yourself in your customer's shoes can help you improve those experience and feeling points that the metrics couldn't tell you.
The secretly unhappy customer
We've all been that customer who has complained about something, but how many times have you not liked something and kept it to yourself?
That happens a lot, 91% of unsatisfied customers don't tell you. The worst thing? They don't come back to your eCommerce and you can't learn from it.
We are so obsessed with good reviews and "leave me an opinion and I'll give you a 10% discount" that we forget the unhappy ones. And yes, unhappy. We treasure a positive review because we know that word of mouth works, but to improve our relationship with our customers we don't have to look at what we do well.
We have to look around and see what we are doing wrong. This is the only way we can continue to improve and adapt to changes in consumer behavior, which lately changes more than Google's algorithm.
Data coming up
Chemistry is the precursor of any relationship, if there is no chemistry we don't usually waste time beyond a hello and hello there. We are not yet able to detect the emotions of our online customers live and direct (we are not that far away), so having a good platform that shows us the behavior of customers will allow us to create unique experiences for each of them.
Feeling special is always good for any relationship but we don't say so, the data says so so let's go with one of pure, hard, unfiltered info:
- 60% of customers who interact with a brand do so through different channels.
- Interactions with chatbots have increased by 80% since the inception of covid.
- 53% of customers buy if the experience is easy and seamless.
- 78% have abandoned a cart at some point.
- 72% of Spanish Internet users between the ages of 16 and 70 shop online.
And we could go on giving you figures until you get dizzy, but that's not our style. Digital's style is to make you a dinner party about the client relationship.
Did you miss it? We forgive you this time, but don't miss our next events at networking.
