Customer Experience – Does it really matter?
Think about your own experiences shopping whether in person or online. I think you care about your experience, and so do your customers care about the experience they have with your company.
Here’s a famous quote from Sam Walton of Walmart – “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” Sobering, but true. So how do you get and retain a customer? On the topic of even getting the customers, we’ll have to unpack that later, but retaining a customer? It’s got to be a good Customer Experience. There are several things that go into this, and it depends on what the customer is looking for and who they are. It might just be low price but could be in stock inventory. It could be the knowledge and expertise of the people they are working with, or it could be not having to talk to a single person to get the product they want.
Customers do indeed have different personas. Some may want to order a part by talking to a counter person or parts professional that they’ve known for years. Some may want to order online at 3 am and not have to chat or talk to anyone and just have the part show up the next day.
To set a good foundation of Customer Experience, you need to start by assessing who the customers are, and what their wants are. If it’s in stock inventory, then clearly communicate on your digital properties or via phone what the status is. If it’s out, when will it be back in? If they order it now, when will they receive it? Nothing is more frustrating than to place an order online, only to have a note back that says something like “out of stock item – may take 8 weeks to fulfill…” If the customer knew that up front, they probably would have gone somewhere else at that time, but might come back to you. In that situation, they may be unlikely to ever return.
After you match up what the customer types are, and what their wants and needs are, then you can look to address plans of how to deliver on those promises. Remind all team members that they are all “in sales” and that delivering a winning customer experience at every touchpoint is paramount for everyone’s success.
We help craft Customer Experience plans all the time, especially when it comes to increasing Conversion Rates or doing Conversion Rate Optimization, so if you need any help, we’re here for you. And hopefully, you’ll have a great Customer Experience working with us.
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What Distributors are doing right
MARKETING TO VARIOUS CUSTOMER TYPES
Marketing to your specific customer types is a key strategy to ensure you not only understand your customers but can successfully sell to them. After you’ve identified the top customer types, it’s important to create specialized content that speaks directly to their needs. A municipal fleet will have a different set of top-selling products than an independent installer would have. Product sales to a dealership are going to look completely different than sales to an independent jobber or retailer.
When thinking about how to target your key customer types, we recommend a few different strategies, including:
- Ensure you have a Line Card page on your website and a PDF version that shows the full breadth of your product offerings
- Create landing pages on your website that speak to each specific customer type
- Create PDFs that target specific customer types and their top-selling products
- Develop specific promotions and specials for each of your customer types
Additionally, if you are using WHI’s Nexpart system, not all of your Hometab content is applicable to every customer in your network. Creating separate, focused Hometab sites will allow you to cater to your customer types and showcase the specials that are most applicable to each of them. Your Nexpart admin account also allows administrators to set different homepages assigned by customer type.
Sound Press helps distributors create specialized Hometab sites for Strategic Accounts with branding and messaging aligned in those partnerships to produce highly effective content and sales materials in B2B eCommerce.
ChatGPT – doing AI business?
This NEWS highlight is on AI – and even a hilarious AI business experiment, worth a read.
Here’s the intro ask of the AI platform – and may be worth reading to see where AI might take us.
“You are HustleGPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart. I can act as a liaison between you and the physical world. You have $100, and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal. I will do everything you say and keep you updated on our current cash total. No manual labor.”
Dynamat
The Dynamat brand is recognized by consumers around the world as quality products for solutions to unwanted noise and vibration. The Dynamat brand maintains the dominant market share in Car Audio and Automotive Restoration acoustic solutions. Dynamat, Inc. also provides a broad range of unique product solutions for home acoustics, computers, appliances, and Original Equipment Manufacturers.
Dynamat came to Sound Press for assistance in enhancing their online presence to better connect with future generations of customers, building on their existing brand equity. In the world of car audio, “Dynamatting” is a verb indicative of THE industry standard for car audio noise-dampening, used much like “Googling” is for web search. Sound Press was called upon to build a cutting-edge site to match their cutting-edge products and allow better interactions with their customers while driving traffic toward their partner distributors to increase product sales.
Did you know?
Josh Chapell – Senior Account Director
Josh has worked in the web world for over 17 years, beginning in Higher Education and Non-Profits managing and building websites, online learning platforms, and digital marketing efforts for both large & small as well as public & private organizations. 2023 will be his 11th year with Sound Press, and during that time Josh has worked extensively with clients across a range of industries including automotive, industrial, professional services, and financial sectors. Josh is lead project manager for many of the website builds at Sound Press, but also specializes in data and systems integrations – building connections between internal and 3rd-party software systems and databases with the front-end web presence of our clients.
Josh manages our team of web designers and developers, providing strategy consulting and often serving as a “translator” between the technical and marketing sides of projects to ensure all systems are working well together to serve the greater marketing strategy of each unique client. Key clients Josh has worked with include Partsource, Uniselect, ACDelco, Tedia, Desma, Centennial, and City Gospel Mission. Josh lives in Fort Worth, TX with his wife Sarah and 2 daughters, and when not chasing his kids around, he enjoys chasing his own shadow on runs both on pavement and on trails near his home.