Delivering Over the Web

The DeliveryDemon is becoming fascinated by marketing and PR, particularly the ways of achieving a balance between appealing to the aspirations of potential customers, and providing those customers with the comfortable feeling that they are dealing with a supplier who can be trusted to fulfil those aspirations as promised. When it comes to marketing over the web, the press regularly has a field day with scare articles which, I am sure, many of us read with the smug assumption that we would never be so foolish as to fall for such a scam.

But how can we distinguish between a genuine seller with poor website skills, and a website thrown together by a scammer who knows that, if they can drive sufficient traffic to the website, enough people will unthinkingly enter their personal or financial details for the scammer to reap a profit? The answer is that there is no foolproof way to distinguish between the scammer and the amateur.

Anyone who wants a commercial website to deliver results needs to deliver a professional presentation in order for the customer to feel confident about buying. The DeliveryDemon has been surprised at how often she considers buying from a website then decides not to because something generates a feeling of mistrust. If you find that potential customers are dropping out half way through buying on your website,  have a look at http://www.thinklikeauser.com/sell-more-online-by-ditching-the-red-flags-on-your-website/ It’s surprising how many websites ignore these ways of building in customer confidence

The UK isn’t delivering

This is a bit of a consumer rant, but with a delivery focus. The UK isn’t delivering at the most basic levels. Being a customer in this country is a battle through marketing hype in a vain attempt to get the goods or services you want to buy or are already paying for. With businesses struggling you would think that some effort would have been diverted to delivering to customers and improving the bottom line. But not in this country. I’ve wasted half of this morning on the phone as a result.

T-mobile is having network problems. OK, technical problems happen. But when the network is down, customers need to find out whether the problems they encounter relate to the phone or the network. When it’s the network they need to know whether the problem is local or widespread. For a technology company with a large website you might expect some sort of network status on the front page. Not with T-mobile. You can’t contact them from the handset of course, so you have to find a landline. Once you get through, you might expect a recorded message to the effect that the network is down. Not with T-mobile. You get stuck in an interminable queue for 20 minutes, listening to some dire muzak selection. At the end of all that it takes about 20 seconds for someone to say the entire network is down, but by this time the customer has wasted the best part of half an hour.

Wake up, T-mobile. If you have problems delivering the network service, there’s no excuse for wasting the time of thousands of customers this way. Use the technology available to you to deliver information to the customer in 3 seconds, not 30 minutes.

And Keyline aren’t doing any better at delivering shampoo to customers. They talk about brands, not products that customers want to buy. It took numerous emails and phonecalls to find that they had bought the Henara brand from Schwartzkopf. Keyline customer services don’t want to get involved in anything so mundane as telling customers where they can obtain a particular product. All they do is pass the customer on to their wholesaler. The wholesaler doesn’t seem to know what they deliver, all the will say is who they deliver to. This leaves the customer ringing round individual pharmacies to find out whether they stock the particular product.

There’s a pattern emerging here and it’s not an encouraging one. For a long time there’s been a focus on branding and marketing. That’s not a bad thing in itself as it makes the product recognisable and visible. But all the branding and marketing in the world doesn’t bring in a penny if the customer can’t buy the product or access the service. And a customer service department is a complete waste of money if they can’t tell the customer what the customer needs to know.

It all comes back to delivery. In hard economic times customers naturally take more care of their spend, and money will gravitate to the companies which deliver the goods. It seems obvious, doesn’t it?  But companies are surprisingly slow to learn the lesson.

Marketing vs Delivery

Not to put too fine a point on it, marketing is there firstly to make us aware of stuff, and secondly to make us want to buy it. On the way, it may amuse or annoy us, pique our curiosity, give us ideas, leave us with a mental image. In summary, it’s a commercial tool which can add a little sparkle to life. At some point the consumer wants to come face to face with the real product, or concept, or whatever is being marketed. That’s when the marketing has to be backed up by the ability to deliver.

Recent events with a pretty mundane product started me thinking about the links between marketing and delivery. The product is a shampoo, and it became obvious a few years ago that the marketing people had lost interest in it. It disappeared from big stores and the customer service email address wasn’t bothering to reply to questions about suppliers. Eventually I tracked it down in an independent shop and bought in a stockpile. When the stockpile ran out I tried customer services again. No reply. The phone number was only manned a few hours a week. Eventually someone answered – ‘we sold that brand last year’.  ‘Brand’, note, not a product which needs to be delivered to customers.

Armed with the name and phone number of the new ‘brand owner’ I tried again. Interestingly, the first question I was asked was whether I had already phoned about the product – there’s obviously a market for the stuff if others are making as much effort as me to track it down. The new brand owner couldn’t name an outlet, either physical or online, and passed me on to their wholesaler. The wholesaler could say which outlets they supplied but not whether they supplied the shampoo to those outlets. In the event, neither of the outlets named stocked the shampoo.

A simple view of the world suggests that if customers are making an effort to track down a product, then that’s a *good thing* It’s marketing itself and all the manufacturer has to do is get it out there in the shops, and maybe give it a bit of a boost from time to time. And it’s a lot cheaper to retain existing customers than to attract new ones. So what’s going on here? With companies failing all around, surely no manufacturer can afford to ignore the existence of a product with such a loyal customer base that it requires no marketing to make people seek it out.

A look at the Keyline website offers no help to the customer, it’s all about marketing and brand acquisition. There’s a huge disconnect here. Physical products need physical delivery to customers and if that doesn’t happen, the marketing is a complete waste of time. There’s a lesson to be learned here.