You never get a second chance to make a first impression with customers — and if you want that impression to matter, this is where you need to invest more.
Your website.
Almost 70% of customers say company websites are the first place they look when they want information on a product or service. Just 10% look to a store or branch. Another 10% go to social media. And about 5% go to either the phone or a mobile app to get more information, according to a recent IntelliResponse Systems Inc. study.
Important impression
So your website is responsible for making most first impressions.
It’s more important than ever to make it easy for customers to get answers from your website before they decide to pick up the phone (which is always more expensive to you), or worse, contact your competitor.
Here’s how two organizations recently made some small changes to their websites and saw significant results:
1. Make info even more accessible
The customer service team at Canadian Tire were happy to answer customers’ complex questions and take their orders. But they wanted to help customers get answers to the most basic questions in other ways.
They worked with Marketing to add a frequently asked questions section to the website, but quickly found out that customers didn’t always search general FAQs because their questions were about specific products or services.
So it gave them the idea to make it easier to ask questions about specific items right when customers looked at them online.
They added an Q&A feature to almost all their product pages. Customers could post questions or search those that were already asked and answered specific to the product they were looking at in that moment.
They also gave customers the opportunity to answer others’ questions. Sometimes service reps didn’t even have to get involved!
In the end, they got 28% fewer calls on products that had one question asked and answered on its product pages, 68% fewer calls on products with two questions and 81% fewer on products with three or more questions.
2. Add some advice
Too much information can be overwhelming for customers. Meanwhile, just the right amount can help them understand and make decisions. Giving just the right amount of details — no more than what you’d put in marketing material or customer service instructions — and a little advice can help customers.
In fact, when RollerSkateNation.com added just a short sentence of advice to its product pages, it cut calls and increased sales (a bonus to any service experience experiment).
The company president added a tip above a product description, giving customers a better idea of the size skates they should buy.
Service reported fewer sizing questions, and the tip generated 69% more individual purchases.
