eCommerce and

If you’re in retail I doubt you’ve had time to catch up on this week’s blog highlights.  I found these particularly interesting this week:

• Search Engine Marketers, I suggest reading Search Engine Land’s post on 9 Myths of Landing Page Quality Score.
• It’s the giving season, and bloggers are doing their part.  Brian Smith of Comparison Shopping Engines is growing a mustache to raise money for DonorsChoose, an organization that lets teachers submit projects they need funding for, if you are interested you can go to his giving page at ComparisonEngines.com.  Joe Hall proposes linking to charities to improve their web presence.  Finally, if you Twitter give Squidoo a tweet and they will donate to charity as well.
• Rand from SEOmoz covers the fundamentals of an SEO campaign in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
• As social networking becomes increasingly more popular the need for reputation management grows.  According to the London School of Economics via Denise Shiffman’s Engagement blog “Every 1% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to .41% growth, while a 1% increase in positive word of mouth correlated to just .14% growth. In other words, reducing negative comments could grow revenue by 300% over increasing positive comments.”
• Search Engine Guide’s, Stoney deGeyter, takes a look back at what he wanted for Christmas from the search engines in 2002.  To see if he got what he asked for click here.
  

Bonus Articles

• Everyone working in the marketing department of your company, you may want to read this. The internet has made it much it easier to measure just how valuable you really are...sorry. 
• Want a job where you work from home making videos about whatever you want while raking in thousands of dollars a month? Well look no further than Youtube. Sounds too good to be true? Well it isn't exactly as easy as it sounds. Building up a fan base on the internet big enough for companies to want to advertise through you will take a while. But here is an article about some of the success stories of Youtube.
• Do you need to reach more people with your advertising? Well, Google has extended its AdWords products to any mobile device that has HTML browsing, such as the iPhone  or T-Mobile's G1. "This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting."
• Customer service is a big part of a computer company, and many people will purchase a certain brand over another just because of their customer service. Well, it seems that Dell did not get the memo. Dell is now "charging customers a monthly fee to have access to its United States-based customer service representatives." You can read more about it here.

I came across a list of 50 things every business should be doing in eCommerce Customer Service at the VirtualHosting.com blog. Christina Laun, the author, does a good job of putting together the list (which can be found here). There are a few things that I would add to her relatively comprehensive list:

51.  Look for easy and scalable solutions. You will hear us say this a lot. Given our mission, it’s critical that we find solutions that are relatively easy and inexpensive to implement (in terms of dollars and resources) and solutions that do not require a complete retooling every time we copy and paste our ecommerce platform into a new vertical market.

52.  Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Examine what others have done. Very few internet retailers can afford to create or monetize bleeding edge technology. Don’t be too creative. Do what you know works based on the experience of others.

53.  Look at your competition. Evaluate what industry leaders are doing in your market space. Certainly, you will want stay in the confines of your means and capabilities (see #51 and #52).

54.   Take time to understand customer expectations and where you may fall short. Evaluate what you do poorly and focus on opportunities to improve where you fall furthest short of expectations. This goes beyond treating problems as opportunities. This means you are constantly looking for and recognizing a problem (especially chronic problems), taking a global view, and creating an easy and scalable solution.

I disagree with # 33 from Christina’s list, “Don’t pitch to unhappy customers”. I say sell to all customers. I don’t mean in the Glengarry Glen Ross, Always Be Closing kind of way. I mean let customers know that you’re serious about earning their business. If you have an unhappy customer, chances are that customer still has a need. Look for ways to fill that need in a way that is both satisfactory for the customer and profitable for your company.

Also, listings 51 through 54 don’t necessarily only appeal to the customer service department. These can be applied to every department in your organization.

Providing excellent service in today’s highly competitive marketplace is somewhat difficult for call centers. Even more difficult is the task of servicing multilingual customers.  Dealing with Hispanic customers encompasses customer relationship opportunities that are not necessarily typical to other demographics. There are a few differences that make it more difficult to “seal the deal” on a purchase, but that can create a pathway to repeat purchases.  I know these things from experience, not only am I myself a Hispanic, Bilingual woman, but I come from a family that encapsulates the Mexican culture.

From my experiences I have learned three key things about Hispanic consumers who decide to purchase from an unknown company and these are the things the look for prior to completing a purchase.  The three key elements I am referring to are: simplicity, relationship and security.

Simplicity

Having a website that is easy to browse and understand is essential when dealing with Hispanic consumers. They want to feel like they understand and have control of the website, not fearing that they may get tricked, or that there is a chance they make a costly mistake. Another feature that may be the most important is the ability to locate a contact phone number; which brings us to the next feature they look for, a relationship.

Relationship 

Having a relationship with our customers can be very time consuming and costly, especially when time is money. With Internet sales sky rocketing, the seller-consumer relationship has dropped considerably. There is no need to talk to someone if you can do it alone, online. Hispanic consumers however, think differently. Though they might be using a different mean (store vs. online) by which they are purchasing an item, a relationship is still essential. Spanish speakers want to be able to ask many questions, talk about the products, and even want to be walked through the ordering process. But the relationship does not stop there. After the sale has been made, Hispanic consumers expect a phone call or an email with updates on their order.  Just as simplicity builds upon the relationship aspect of this purchasing decision, relationship builds on the next point, security.

Security

The relationship that is started with a Hispanic customer brings about a sense of security for the customer. They know two things:

1. They purchased an item from an actual “person”.
2. That person took the time to know who they were and what they purchased by simply picking up the phone.
   

These two simple facts reduce any fear that they might have had from purchasing from a new vendor. Thus allowing the customer to relax and patiently wait for their order.

These three features, while often difficult to provide, can and will give a company a competitive advantage. When fully satisfied with the above, a Hispanic customer is more likely to become a return customer. Loyalty has to be one of their greatest attributes. When a Spanish speaking customer finds a company that provides them with a relationship, that company becomes a “friend”; a friend whom you trust and continue to do business with. 

Opportunity for Growth

According to ambicultural.com there are 37 million Hispanics in the United States alone.   An estimated 15 million use the internet, and this number is expected to increase by 20% year over year.  Based on these attributes and our desire to create these relationships, we ourselves have been able to track remarkable results in this demographic.  We have experienced a 4.7% increase in repeat purchases with this customer base. We understand that a customer will not be purchasing a faucet monthly or even yearly, but the fact is that with our Hispanic customers, loyalty stands and we see that revealed in our numbers.  As this market continues to grow so does the opportunity for all internet retailers. 

The short answer is “Yes?”. Your customer is the reason you’re able to stay in business, especially in these tight times. This does not, however, definitively mean that “the customer is always right”. Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of Selfridges department stores in the UK in 1909, is credited with coining the phrase “the customer is always right”. Mr. Selfridge likely did not intend to be taken literally. Rather, he used it to change the psychology of his customers and employees. Customers would, perhaps, feel that a company cared for them. Employees would be continually exposed to the notion that a customer could not be wrong. Presumably, this would result in a prevailing attitude among employees to treat customers positively, regardless of how the customers treated employees.

The unfortunate thing is that customers have latched onto a widespread disposition that they cannot be wrong. Even more unfortunate, as a privately held, small business, we are not able to afford the Nordstrom customer service model. We have customer complaints. But, we were unable, financially, to accommodate every customer request. It may sound terrible to think that a company would take the stance that the customer isn’t always right, but it’s true. Please do not misunderstand. We love our customers and we absolutely want everybody to be delighted with their shopping experience. However, there are situations where a customer’s expectations are not met, but we have made every effort to build clear expectations for the customer before they buy.

I’ll give you an example. A customer buys a valve with low profit margin from PlumberSurplus.com without contacting our customer service team, thinking that the valve will work with their existing plumbing. The specifications for the valve are clearly stated on the product detail page. The customer must read and agree to our web site’s terms of use, including our returns policy, before they are able to create an account or place an order. The customer receives the valve that they ordered in good condition and their plumber tells them that this is not the right valve. The customer immediately contacts PlumberSurplus.com and tells us that they received the wrong product. In researching the issue, we discover that the product that the customer ordered was the product that was sent. The customer simply did not order the correct valve. No problem. We are able to accept the product in return. However, the customer feels that PlumberSurplus.com should make it more clear that the valve does not support all types of plumbing and does not want to pay to ship the product back to PlumberSurplus.com or pay a restocking fee. The customer has already read and agreed to the returns policy which makes both clear. PlumberSurplus.com has made every effort to stipulate what type of plumbing this valve will accommodate. So we say “No. Your order is subject to the policies that you agreed to upon buying”.

The customer then files a dispute with their credit card company. PlumberSurplus.com is charged a processing fee for the dispute that is greater than the profit margin of the valve. PlumberSurplus.com ultimately wins the dispute and we receive our money for the sale, but we still have to pay the processing fee for the dispute. You may ask yourself, “Why don’t you just change the returns policy?” We thought of that. The cost to pay to return the item to PlumberSurplus.com and the cost associated with processing the return is potentially even greater than the cost of the credit dispute processing fee! Either way, we lose.  On the flip side happy customers come back and we may be able to make up the costs then.

So, to recap, we set an expectation of what product the customer was buying and how the customer would have to return it, should they elect to do so. The customer agreed. The customer changed their mind when they discovered that they made a poor buying decision and asked PlumberSurplus.com to pay for the mistake. In this case, the customer was not “right”. At this point, PlumberSurplus.com has to evaluate whether or not it is valuable to lose money on this customer. For various reasons, it may be valuable to lose money on a given customer, but not “always”.