We wrap up our week of focusing on the online customer journey by looking at the final two stages – the service experience and the recommendation experience.
The Service Experience
Once you’ve successfully converted site visitors into paying customers, you’ll want to assure that it’s easy for customers to continue doing business with you and help them get the most out of their investment in your products or services. Oftentimes, in industries like financial services, healthcare, or even government, you’ll want to provide your customers, patients, or constituents with both a public online presence where they can find information and engage with your organization early in the customer journey, and also an online self-service presence that enables your customers to access secure services where they can conduct financial transactions, look up personal health information or take advantage of government services.In cases like this, the combination of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Portal is ideally suited to helping you meet both of these objectives and ultimately deliver an online experience that is unified, consistent and seamless as those visiting your web presence evolve from prospects into active customers.
The whole
idea of incorporating a self-service aspect into a company’s online engagement
strategy is definitely one that is picking up steam as companies looks at new
ways to service their customers efficiently and effectively online.And not only is online self-service a means
for driving greater efficiencies, the vast majority of customers – 75% -- prefer
to use online support if it’s available and reliable.
The Recommendation Experience
The final phase that you should consider in your online marketing strategy is the recommendation phase, whereby satisfied customers become advocates for your brand and recommend it to others. The opinions that people share about their experiences with a product or brand are a highly valued source of information relied upon by prospective customers as they contemplate a purchasing decision.In fact, 70% of consumers trust the opinions of other online users, making it one of the most trusted types of information that potential buyers consider, second only to the opinions of people they know.1
You can tap
into the influence your satisfied customers can have over prospective customers
by making it easy for them to share their experiences with their social
networks, and to contribute helpful comments, ratings or reviews of your
products and services. The ability to share and contribute socially on your web
presence should be given component of your web presence.You can encourage social sharing and the
contribution of user-generated content by enabling social login on your web
presence, whereby customers can login into your site quickly and easily using
their familiar social networking profiles. Such capabilities are available to
you when you use Oracle WebCenter Sites for web experience management.
This concludes our series of posts on the online customer journey.Remember that developing an effective online experience that supports the customer life cycle is critical to driving sales and earning long term loyalty.
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Are you
providing your customers with engaging online experiences using Oracle? If so,
you probably realize that there's more to exceptional customer engagement than
just web experience management. You must also empower your business by engaging
and enabling employees and partners to deliver on customers' expectations. Join
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1Neilsen, “Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages,” 2011