“Love me” is the mantra that consumers are shouting all over the world and they are not referring to their personal relationships. They are talking about their relationship, moreover, their lack of a relationship with all the companies where they choose to spend their hard-earned cash. Is it too much for these businesses to make them feel appreciated?

Many companies do consider the consumer for their targeted marketing campaigns, which you can see all around.
Major brands like ‘HSBC’ deliver their premier service within special areas in select branches and O2 with the rebranded Millennium Dome. However, do they really consider the consumer throughout their operations? If they did, would you really get parcels delivered during the day at home while you are at work and would they make you fill out ten pages of cryptic questions just to place an order on their site.

So how can companies address this mis-alignment between their marketing message and their actual offering – the answer is Customer Experience Management (CEM). Where companies have previously been reactive to the customer and focusing on capturing activity through CRM tools, CEM is about predicting, managing and optimising the customer experience throughout the organisation.

In ecommerce, the customer experience has often been an afterthought with business processes and operational issues taking precedence. Customer experience is more fundamental than the usability testing that companies do because at its heart, you are not focused on just structure and layout. Fundamentally should you even bother with the functionality in the first place? A good example is the ‘Tell a friend’ link on web sites that is used by so few people that it hardly deserves the pixel space, whilst in-store collection and returns is so fundamental that is seems a shame that it is only now becoming available with a few key retailers.

Enhancing and simplifying the customer experience will be at the core of ecommerce innovations in 2008, because above all it will drive loyalty and increase bottom line revenue. The customer experience will become intuitive where changing the quantity in a basket actually changes the totals without having to find the recalculate button and changing a size, just means one click on the basket rather than having to remove a product and add the new size again. We are getting closer. If we keep working at it then it won’t be long until every site greets you with a friendly welcome and knows what you want before you can even think of it yourself!

Ravi Damani, Imano