Business Cloud Summit: Customers have the power, warns US entrepreneur
Posted by Dan Martin in Marketing & PR, Technology, Business trends on Wed, 01/12/2010 - 10:32
A shifting balance of power to the consumer means business owners must differentiate themselves by the experience they offer customers rather than pricing and products, an entrepreneur has warned.
At Sift Media's Business Cloud Summit 2010 in London on Tuesday, Greg Gianforte, chief executive of RightNow Technologies, said: “The first step is to recognise that the root cause of most bad experiences is lack of knowledge so you start by establishing knowledge and expose that through customer touch channels to empower customers to help themselves.”
Providing consumers with answers to queries on company websites could eliminate between 30% and 50% of incoming emails and reduce call volumes by between 10% and 20% within a few weeks, while also improving customer satisfaction, he added.
But Gianforte also warned that consumers were becoming “more conscious” of how their personal data was being used to “their benefit or detriment”. This situation was likely to generate legislation that would differ on a country-by-country basis and would undoubtedly create challenges for multinational companies, he said.
Nonetheless, despite particularly marked fears around privacy in the social networking arena, he believed that the channel provided “too much value” to consumers to start abandoning it now. “You’d have to push a very large boulder in front of that train to derail it,” Gianforte said.
RightNow, which positions itself as a vendor of customer experience-based software-as-a-service offerings, currently generates 40% of its revenues from online, 5% from social media and 45% from call centres.
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