Today we have the seventh step out of eleven. We talk about communication for the benefit instead of harm.

Summary of the previous series

Meet the expectations.

Make the site simple.

Show current stock.

Allow customers to pay by card.

Segment the proposal.

Offer the necessary related products.

Communicate only on business

The persistent desire to communicate with some online stores is as energetic and as irrelevant as the behavior of a drunken man, convinced of his irresistibleness for all the girls around in general.

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Some stores send several messages by e-mail, while one is more than enough. Most stores make several calls to the customer, even when it is absolutely not required.



There is a good rule for online stores: use the least distracting customer from his business out of all possible communication channels.



Here, for example, the 220-volt.ru store, which has already been an example in our articles (and this is not the worst option, believe me!) They send SMS, it’s good that they don’t call. But why so many messages instead of one?







A normal user of a normal online store is waiting for his order to be confirmed somehow. Of course, it is better to confirm the order by email. If you fear that your emails get into spam, you can duplicate the text message, although, for example, Amazon, working with the whole world, is not afraid of getting emails into spam and SMS does not send.

Iron rule: when can I call

You can call only in two cases: if you are a courier who informs you about the emergency delivery of the goods or specifies how to find the right address, or if there is a problem with the order. And if the courier should always call (preferably - an hour before arriving at the place), then problems should not arise. The problem is “the goods ended unexpectedly in stock”, “we do not have delivery to this city”, “payment did not go through”, etc. The site should catch possible problems in advance, and not bring the matter to the order that you can not fulfill.

Minimize communication

The online store is comfortable for the buyer because you don’t have to go anywhere and talk to anyone, and the order itself can be made on the road, at night at home, or from a noisy office. For the owner, an online store is also an additional comfort: no need to train sellers, no need to worry about theft from the shelves, no need for a trading room, etc. In the online store and the seller and the buyer save time and money.



So stop reducing these advantages to nothing with empty chatter with customers, damn it!



Did the buyer place an order? Well, tell him that the order has been accepted. Send him an e-mail. Be sure in advance when testing the site that e-mails from you reach buyers. And send him nothing more. Until the moment when you need to get the goods, the buyer does not want to see and hear anything about you.



No, do not tell him that the goods have been handed over to the delivery service. No, you do not need to call him to confirm the list of goods and addresses. No, do not think that the buyer is an idiot, and cannot correctly fill in a primitive form on your site.



For example, they call me from the reimashop.ru store and phone me in detail about everything I wrote in the form on the website. Yes, I could be wrong. But I should have seen my mistake in the order confirmation letter! A letter came to me!







Here you see a list of ordered products with links to their pages on the site? What about the delivery address? And the price? Not? And you know why? Because they are not there!



(here you can slightly distract from reading, recall a similar scene from “Pulp Fiction”, watch from the beginning to 1:06)







And instead of the detailed conditions of the purchase already made, the letter should have this:

* a list of all that is ordered, with links to the description pages of each product and prices

* total price

* delivery address

* delivery time, if known

* other information ("the goods will be delivered by courier service" Namarek ").

We write letters correctly

You do need to be sure that the client will not only receive the goods ordered on time, but also come to you again and again? Write him a letter so that he was comfortable to find you. He will hardly remember in three months how your store was called and what is its Internet address. However, in any email client, you can search by the content of the letters. Does the client remember that he bought somewhere, for example, cologne? Great, send him an order confirmation with a list of orders.



This is not just convenient, it also helps the client to then find the old letter and order the goods from you again. Therefore, write in the letter and the address of your site, and phone number, if any.



Despite the fact that the client does not seek to remember the name of your store, help him with this, maybe he will appreciate it and tell someone where he bought the goods. To do this, write the name of the store in the subject (so it is easier to find in the mailbox and remember).



Here is an example of a letter without this information:







Why not write here the name of the online store? This letter will be lost in ten days in a heap of inboxes, and even if it is found by its contents, why should the buyer guess what the site of the store is and what is the name of the store?



Do you want to insure against customer complaints about delivery not on time? Be sure to write the terms of delivery on the site, and again - in the letter with the order confirmation. Let the letter be both the date and time of the order, if selected in advance.

Buyer should be comfortable

Take again reimashop.ru. This store is known to many parents of young children: it is here that you can (theoretically) buy the best overalls for children - resistant to dirt, water, snow and wind. However, the excellent quality of Finnish goods goes into the shadows because of the unrealistically strange manner of communication of this store.



People who have only Apple’s MacBook at home are fairly common among middle-aged parents in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I am sure that among your acquaintances you will remember these: MacBooks have long migrated from a niche "laptops for fashion designers and businessmen" to a niche "teachers, students, software developers, all sorts of creative personalities and many others."



Imagine: reimashop.ru (this is an online store of expensive children's clothes in the middle of Moscow, and not a stall selling spare parts for the Ural motorcycle in a village almost abandoned by everyone on the Baikal highway!).





Illustration: federal highway "Baikal"



So: in the store reimashop.ru you can not buy anything if you went to the site from the Safari browser on the MacBook. Because (drum roll, ta-ta-ta-there!) This browser is NOT SUPPORTED! I was informed about this by phone when I called the store's support service. On the site, of course, not a word about it, and you can break your head to understand why the basket disappears, then it appears, and you need to enter a six-digit index in the delivery address, and do not enter more than 4 characters.



Do you think the support service said it was a temporary disaster, and is it already urgently corrected? Nothing of the kind: the operator advised to “go to the site from the desktop computer and order from there”. The idea that a person in 2016 may not have a desktop computer, or he may also be a Mac with all the same Safari, was not registered in the script to the call center operator.

How a store loses money on the lack of support for all browsers

So it turns out that people who have both a Mac and children are willing to spend on the purchase of good children's clothes not less money than those who have a desktop under Windows XP at home. If the store, by ridiculous chance or oversight of the site developers, refuses this particular category of customers, it loses three times:

1) Direct loss: a person who is already ready to buy a product (an error has occurred on the delivery design page, that is, the decision to purchase has long been made), refuses to purchase. In the end, the same product can be bought in other stores.

2) Indirect loss: a person distracts with questions from contact center employees, they spend time and money on answers by calling 8-800.

3) Reputational risks and damage to an international brand: frankly stupid mistake on the site annoys customers, they endure irritation to the whole Reima brand as a whole. In the future, even if the error is corrected, the sediment will remain. But revenue may fall.



UPD : At the last minute before the publication of the article, the director of the Digital Customer Experience at Reima wrote to me: "But this is because I was not too lazy to find the Reima guide in Finland and write a letter there about how things are on the website in Russia. So everything will be fine :)

Registration should be easy

We have already talked about registration in earlier articles, but it is important to repeat, since we are now discussing communication: registration should be simple and unobtrusive.



Ideal - if the buyer is registered at the time of the first purchase. Just do not ask him for the full surname, name and patronymic, and demand to come up with a super-complicated password. Enough e-mail'a and any password (enter once, the second - it is not necessary, because if you forget, ask to reset and re-invent, nothing complicated).



Yes, the delivery will require the name, address and telephone. Everything else - a passport, middle name and last name, birthday, and so on - is completely superfluous.



But what should be necessary is a confirmation of registration by e-mail. In it is a link to click. This is insurance against both spam and typo in the email address.

Communicate when a client asks for it

Once I met a store that suffers from a rare phobia: he just does not like to communicate. However, minimizing communication should not be brought to the point of absurdity. Here is how they answered my product question:







Between question and answer MONTH has passed! Of course, I got through the next day after the question. It turned out, however, that not only the store’s website contains incomplete and inaccurate information that raises questions. Also, calls there are answered only a small part of the day on workdays, and online questions are accepted only via VKontakte login. This is an outrageous oddity. And if I do not use VK? And if you forgot the password from it? Finally, why by default to post this my question on my VK page, what happens if I ask it on the store page?



It is necessary to make descriptions of the goods as clear as possible, apply consistent photos and use some generally accepted comfortable method for feedback. Both e-mail, and chat, and the form of contacting the store manager are suitable.



Posting questions via VKontakte with an unexpected public posting on the client’s page is a soooo weird way of communication.

Do without chat and callback on all pages

The invention of chat rooms and the ordering of call-backs and the subsequent distribution of these services added to the windows of many stores a truly Gypsy ingenuity and intrusiveness. Believe me, the client is able to click the modest “ask a question” link or “clarify details” somewhere near the product description or in the upper menu bar. But there, when the page on the link opens, it is already possible to let the marketer's fantasies wander: let there be an online chat, a call order, a feedback form, an address, and how to find us on the street, and everything else. But poking a man in the nose with all this, in general, useful information when he chooses goods is a fair amount of stupidity.



Choosing a product? Do not interfere, let him choose. Unlike the supermarket, even kleptoman will not be able to steal your goods from the laptop screen. If in the sales area the annoying attention of the seller is the execution of the task “not to leave the buyer out of sight”, then there is no need to accompany the customer with the chat window floating behind him. Himself come to the chat, if you really need.

See you later!

In the next article - about the delivery.