Websites can do much more than promotions and sales:

•    Manage warranty and service
•    Give your customers better service than your opposition offers
•    Build customer loyalty:
o       Involve customers in product improvement
o       Reduce warranty claims
o       Increase word of mouth referrals
o       Reduce customer complaints
o       Build product communities
•    Attract good employees
•    Get more from your suppliers
•    Improve team morale
•    Improve operational efficiency
•    Measure customer satisfaction
•    Measure team spirit

Manage warranty and service

Customers are more likely to register for warranty if they can do it online.

Encourage this by telling customers they won’t need to find their receipt or find a serial number for products they have registered on line; that they’ll get faster warranty service and notification of any product upgrades.

Create a registration page on your website that links direct to your customer database and you won’t have to do any warranty registration processing. You can even (as specified in your privacy agreement) send your registered people automated upgrade offers that relate to the age of their purchase.

You can put service booking onto your website, either as a request form or as a live booking engine that tells the customer immediately when the next service person is available. Your service people can use the same engine to plan their tasks, including accessing addresses, phone numbers and product types, even installation details – all available anywhere there is internet.

Put your warranty and service terms here too and you’ll have fewer disputes.

And, of course, any manuals or instructions you have, as downloadable PDFs and on screen.
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Give your customers better service than your opposition offers

If you create information for your clients, you can probably gain a market advantage by putting that information on-line (in a password protected area) so your clients can access it on demand.

You’ll be able to get the information to them quicker.

They’ll be able to study data and look for helpful trends.

They’ll have everything they need from you, organised and stored permanently.
For many clients, this will be a strong offering.

Most likely, they will come to rely on their internet access and you’ll spend less time on data preparation, presentation and follow up queries.

You can put your accounts to each customer on line too, and save your accounts department some time in lost paperwork replacement and account queries.
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Build customer loyalty

Websites can build customer loyalty in several ways, including:

Customer loyalty: Involve customers in product improvement

Invite your customers to help you develop your product by making suggestions. Don’t just say thanks for an idea, post it to the product development section of your website, along with positive comments. (Even if the idea is unworkable, there are positive aspects to why it was suggested and what the person is trying to achieve. Then you can regretfully describe the impediments.)

Put up regular updates on what your R&D department is doing too.

Invite comment on the ideas you receive (and the ones you develop yourself).

When you have a lot of options, turn them into an e-news to your clients, or an on-line survey.

People love to be asked. They like their opinions to be treated as valuable. If they feel they are involved in a product’s development, they will start to “own” the brand. And, surprise surprise, sometimes users come up with good ideas – for free.
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Customer loyalty: Reduce warranty claims

Any warranty manager will tell you that a big slice of warranty issues are to do with customers not knowing how to use the product, not product problems.

You can reduce warranty claims by putting up “how-to” videos, suggestions from users, a proper FAQs (based on warranty claims, not sales blurb) and a clear statement of your warranty.

Whenever a customer registers a new product, immediately email them the link to the videos (put it on any printed material that goes with the product, too).

Product how-to information reduces warranty claims, if it gets to purchasers in time.
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Customer loyalty: Increase word of mouth referrals

When in the purchase cycle is a customer most likely tell someone else that your product is really good?
Actually, it’s when the product is delivered.

At that moment their need to prove to themselves that they made a good purchase is at its highest, and having a friend appreciate the product’s benefits is the best way for them to fill their need.

Unfortunately, it’s also the point at which most sales processes fall down. The box contains unintelligible instructions. It’s delivered by the cheapest (scruffiest, least caring) courier contractor available. And, by the time they get home, you’ve gone home too, leaving them to it.

If you maximise support to your customers at point of delivery and actively help them have an immediate positive experience, you will get more word of mouth referrals (and fewer complaints).

Why most companies don’t understand this is beyond me, but it means you can get a market advantage right here.

So, put video instructions, customer tips, product use information and a Helpline on your website and make sure your customers get that information when they get the product.

Want to get really sophisticated?

Break the how-to video into steps and after each step ask the client to click on the website that it worked for them. When they get to the end and confirm everything is working to their satisfaction (so you have confiormed a positive experience), immediately award them a “mates-freebie” voucher they can print off or record the code, that gives them and a friend a matching freebie if they refer the friend for a purchase.

(The matching double freebie is important in Australia where there is high cultural resistance to American–style dobbing people in for personal gain.)
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Customer loyalty: Reduce customer complaints

What I have found through practical research is that complaints cluster; they self-multiply.

For most people, complaining is not pleasant. To psych themselves up and ensure their actions are justified, if they have one issue, they look for others and bundle them all together into a big whammy.

Often, if they hadn’t had the first (real) problem they might not have complained about the other things. Now the person they inflict this barrage of complaints on has no idea that just one issue is the core and thus the key to solving the problem. They just see a mountain.

The way to reduce point of delivery complaints is to ask for them, to make it easy to complain – and to respond to them immediately. (Note that this is a point of delivery strategy, not necessarily a product life strategy.)

Most complaints procedures are the opposite of this, they slow the process of the complaint down, perhaps because no-one wants to front up, or maybe they think it will go away and haven’t learned that it will fester and cluster.

Your website can be a tool for nipping problems in the bud if it has a section about new products/installs with lots of advice and a fast response mechanism (email, phone, Twitter) that gets at least a recognition response within minutes. An automated website response can help overcome initial staff reluctance to confront, by starting the process in motion. It can ensure the complaint is not lost or overlooked.

The complaints procedure on your website should ask people to say what was the first thing they noticed that was wrong – and your response should focus on this.

When it’s all over, send complainants a thank you email. Tell them, customer complaints are your best form of market research. Say it because it’s true.
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Customer loyalty: Build product communities

People use products in different ways. Ways you and other customers may never have thought of.

If you can get your clients talking about how they used and enhanced your product – via your website– you are on your way to building a product community.

It won’t always happen, but it’s well worth it if it does. Product communities are the absolute pinnacle of social media.
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Attract good employees

Just like customers, good potential employees evaluate you before they engage.

Make sure your website presents the employer image you want, including employment specific information.

Enrich your employment section with a video with some of your people saying why they like working for you. Most people value workplace relationships right at the top of their job criteria, they will even accept a little less money in return for a workplace where they like the people, but often when they accept a job they do not know what the people are like. A video can give some confidence and add weight to your job offer.
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Get more from your suppliers

Do you give your best to the customers you like? The ones who seem to be genuinely interested in you and what you are doing?
Add a section to your website headed, We’re a great business because we have great suppliers.  Give each of your suppliers some space, some recognition, some promotion. They’ll do most of the work for you, in supplying material.
Update it regularly, with news from them.
And then expect them to deliver more than they do for their other customers.
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Improve team morale

Your own employees are a key, primary promotional target. Your customers won’t be convinced until your staff are.

An intranet, set up as part of your website, can help by keeping staff up to date on what’s happening in the business, progress on projects, staff events (eg, births, holidays).

In many companies staff feel they are kept in the dark by management and they experience this as a little insulting to their abilities, ideas, commitment and worth. But often management doesn’t mean to withhold information, it’s just that there is no easy procedure for sharing company information.

An intranet can solve this common morale problem.
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Improve operational efficiency

An intranet that documents company procedures and goals, that includes standard forms and allows tracking of projects can also improve operational efficiency.

Measure customer satisfaction

Every SME believes they give good customer service.

Very few measure it by asking customers.

Perhaps that’s because so many of them fear the truth may not be so positive. More generously, perhaps its because customer satisfaction surveys are either expensive or ineffectual.

The Net Promoter measure is a tool that is widely used for continuous, low cost, reliable assessment of customer satisfaction. The tool needs a single access point to customers; if your website has for example centralized warranty information, this can be an ideal Net Promoter assessment point.

By asking your clients a single question about their propensity to recommend the organisation to others, you can get a continuing snapshot measure of customer satisfaction that can be compared over time and across industries.

Measure team spirit

Your website can also be a tool for continuous assessment of staff morale, through such factors as work satisfaction, task achievement and goal direction.  It can do this for example through anonymous weekly ratings that are made on line (or via mobile device using my upcoming app!) and then automatically scored and distributed.

Conclusion

Most organisations could do more with their website, improving the organisation’s efficiency, saving them money, improving staff morale and building stronger relationships with customers.

The model of the websites simply as a sales tools sells the technology short and is unlikely to hold up in the future.
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