Technology Pushes Companies to Approach Clients Smarter
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These days internet and social media are giving us a lot of information. Why is it than that we feel frustrated when we are being sold a product or service and have the feeling we are not understood in our quest of our purchase or our problem? Why has technology changed all of this?
Customers are spending much time browsing the web studying their purchase requirements and getting informed on the product or service they are looking for. Then when getting out there to see our product and make the purchasing decision, we are looking for representatives who can help us in our purchase decision. Questions we still have should be correctly addressed; why is the one product or service more expensive than the other, what are the differences between products and what specifications or information is missing when make that purchase?
How many times have you gone to a shop and the representative aiding you is reading all information from the product specification which you can read yourself online or in that same shop near the product . Then, when asking a deeper kind of question, the assistance stops. At this stage, you probably know more than the representative because you have undertaken research on the matter.
While examples of business to customer situations may easily come to the reader's mind, imagine the possible complexity in a business to business transaction. In my opinion, a lot of companies need to revalue their strategies because of the technology available to the purchaser. What I discuss here isn't new, but taking it a step further and linking this towards the companies staff and what it means for them, is a necessary step not everyone has taken. Having personnel in your shop or company without adequate knowledge is not helping your customers. To my mind this is one of the reason why we see so many retailers going out of business and why companies are struggling with their sales strategy with the effect of technology and information available to customers.
In the "old days" the seller was better informed than the purchaser and therefore he or she had added value. Our purchase decision was partly based on trust in the seller. With the internet and social media providing us more information and with technology making work simple and increase our knowledge, the question is what added value these salespeople or assistance in a shop have. A different kind of added value is needed: expert knowledge, empathy and a will to actually aid the customers. Let me try to explain hereunder.
The other day I ran into a company called Manifesto, a Business Coaching & Personal Accountant company in Amsterdam the Netherlands. The concept is simple though ground breaking. Let technology do the work that needs to be done "cooking the books" and have professionals coach companies in what the company results and balance sheet mean and how effective you are in reaching the companies goals. That is added value we are looking for. Not some random accountant who is telling you exactly what you can read yourself when looking at your KPI. Or doing your tax return, so you can actually scrap that from your to do list but leaves you in the dark because you can hardly follow him/her when the numbers are explained.
Another example, Clondalkin Grootegast, a company in the north of the Netherlands and a subsidiary of a corporate holding I used to work for. Being in a competitive packaging market this company changed its strategy putting their employees knowledge first, meaning as top priority, and have technology, in this case Salesforce, working for their employees. With this strategy change, they are making a difference within this market and added value to their customers.
Of course there are also the more familiar companies that made these changes, like PayPal, Nintendo, Tesla, eBay, Salesforce and many more. Not only did these companies change their internal processes due to technology, but also they changed the strategy of educated their staff and elevated their tasks to meet the overall strategy. They actually were able to answer the question, "how will technology change the way we look at our staff?".
What this basically means for both people as for companies, we need to change our mind-set, just pretending to be of service isn't enough. Companies, especially retailers, need employees to go from quantity to quality, from <bodies> to <minds>. Your staff needs to be educated, needs to know how your customers can be helped with their purchase challenge and how your company can have the best added value with your staff servicing that customer. This will not always be easy and probably the costs initially will go up due to education and investing in technology, but you need to sow before you can harvest.
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