Technology gives businesses the opportunity to enhance customer relationships. But it’s also technology that has the potential to damage the relationship between a customer, and a business.
In case I haven’t stressed this enough in previous posts, improving the customer’s experience is a goal all businesses ought to aspire to achieve. If you can learn how to make things better for your customer, you will see the impact on your revenue.
The advantage tech gives businesses
In the kind of market we operate in, the customer – for the most part – decides if a company is winning or losing.
If customers are unhappy about the company’s product, or operations, they may simply use a competitor’s products. What this means for the business then, is that it needs to find ways to keep the customer happy.
Technology gives you the ability to do this. Analytical data may reveal that customers get stuck on a specific page on your company’s e-commerce site, for example.
When you understand the customer’s problems, then you can design your products and services around solving those problems.
You may require customers to consent and give you their data, but learn that they do not click consent because they have concerns about their data privacy. Providing an explanation describing what each consent is, will help you overcome this resistance. See the analysis of Google’s explanations.
Another example explanation use:
Informing the user that a specific route is recommended on the GPS because the shorter route has traffic, may just be what prevents you from losing trust from a customer that thinks the routes provided on the GPS are always long.
The damage tech can cause
Similar to betrayal in relationships, when the business has much information about its customers, it can lead to the company exploiting the customer.
An example of this was seen in 2018 when Facebook sold its users’ data to third parties.
This can have detrimental effects on a company (See Facebook’s 2018 decline data here).
But, more importantly, trust is lost.
Today, customers can access more information than was ever possible before. If not handled responsibly, technology may lead to the demise of a business.
Conclusion
With each step, you take to understand and develop your product and service, the question is always:
“Does the company benefit because of serving the customer,” or “Does the company benefit because of exploiting the customer?”
Does your organisation have any “rules” related to tech use?
