Trying to choose a primary focus of whether to offer your customers the practical convenience of online automation or more personalized direct client service is a common dilemma when planning your online business strategy. When you actually begin thinking about it, there are definitely both pros and cons to both methods. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.
Online Automation
By automating your website’s sales process, you’re ideally ensuring that your customer can complete an order or lead generation conversion step directly right from your website at any time they choose to visit. Of course, the process should naturally guide them from their first landing on your site all the way through the sales process. This type of automation does require some planning and tweaking, but in many instances, there’s literally nothing better than a finely tuned machine.
Personal Client Service
While automation just works in many cases, some niches are ideally served by hands-on personalized client service. For example, if you’re in the business online of selling DVDs, the likelihood that your customers are going to require direct personal service are slim to none — they’re just looking for a good price and for your company to deliver the product on time and intact. On the other hand, if you’re selling a product like new homes, or perhaps home mortgage loans, your customers are simply not going to place a final order for delivery via your website; instead, they’re going to need personalized client service and guidance throughout the decision and buying process.
Achieving Balance
In the end, it shouldn’t necessarily be about taking an either/or approach, but rather one of finely-tuned balance. So you don’t have to choose between offering your customers convenient online automation or instead giving them personalized client service. You should (and really have to) offer both, perfectly balanced to your product and niche.
Reaching a healthy balance with online automation as a priority would be letting customers complete the purchase of that new DVD all online, just as they’d like. But personalized service still needs to be available at a minimum in case they have any questions or run into problems with the order.
When your main focus needs to be on personalized service first and foremost, you’ve definitely got to go above and beyond in offering that to your customers. In this case, your balance of automation would rely on driving contacts and building leads — doing things like including contact forms strategically located in your copy.
Again, in the end, you don’t want to go with just online automation or just personalized client service. Instead, you’ve got to work hard to attain that balance that your customers expect — and at the same time, ideally the balance that ends up driving the most conversions. Automation and service should work in harmony.
Until Next Time.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.
