Deliver a Great Online Experience

Posted: 03/18/16

By Richard Rutigliano, PriMedia Inc.

Companies now have the tools to build great online environments where customers can serve themselves 24/7. Consumers want the option to do business with you any time using a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Consider empowering your customers and clients with apps like these.

• Account look-up. Build a secure, functional portal where your customers can manage their relationship with you. Present all the account data that your software system can make available, including payment history, appointments, status updates and the like. Think of your traditional website as the arena where prospects check you out, and the account portal as the environment where customers interact with you. Display coupons and special offers inside the portal to support your sales goals.
  
  
• Enrollment and e-commerce. Help customers make contact, initiate a relationship and manage their services, and they will be much more likely to choose you and stay with you. With the right software, you can enable them to take decisive action instantly without a phone call.
  
  
• Loyalty rewards. Loyalty rewards have come a long way in recent years. Companies that offer high-end, flexible rewards programs that operate online are well positioned to incentivize and reward loyalty.
  
  Customers love rewards programs that offer them a wide range of attractive redemption options. They love earning rewards points and browsing online to see what desirable items are within their range or just out of reach.
  
  A program like PriMedia’s OnPoint can put your company in a new league and give customers repeat doses of joy that you could never deliver just by being a great company doing great work. Customers expect you to do your job, but they love it when they get a fresh infusion of reward points.
  
  You can sprinkle rewards points on various occasions to make customers think happy thoughts about your company several times a year. Reward them for every purchase. Reward them on their anniversary with the company. Reward them whenever the company has an important occasion.
  
  The best programs notify customers automatically whenever they earn reward points and also handle fulfillment, so customers can redeem seamlessly without adding any stressful chores for the office staff. These programs can also post automatically to Facebook so your customers can announce points distributions in their news feeds.
  
  A program with thousands of redemption options also makes the company stickier, because no customer will want to walk away from a large stack of rewards points that they could soon convert for a coveted electronic device or television set.
  
  Managers love a flexible rewards program too, because it enables them to provide bonus rewards points at their discretion.

• Paperless billing. More consumers are managing all their business online. Support them with a paperless billing option, and enable them to sign up for it in the account look-up space.
  
  
• SMS messaging (texting). The smartphone is the communications and action hub for many consumers. When you use text messaging effectively to support your operations, you mesh seamlessly with their lives. Deploy a text messaging application that simplifies the sending of personalized texts and promote it on your website.

When you’re looking to create the most customer-friendly website in your market, PriMedia is here to help. Please give me a call at 800-796-3342 or email me at rrutigliano@primediany.com.