Operating in Your Customer’s Time Zone

I’m not talking about time zones on a map; I’m talking about the time zone in your customer’s mind. Their time, and how you can ensure they love you and love your company. Treat your customer’s time like it is your own and they might just love you forever.

Why?

In the past few years, we’ve been talking to customers about the issue of time. We’ve become acutely aware of the time that is being wasted on traditional e-commerce solutions.

SMBs are wasting enormous amounts of their team’s time, using a multitude of systems to cobble together an overall system to run their e-commerce business effectively. This time is being wasted making multiple systems talk to each other. It is also being wasted in trying to find the correct, up-to-date information on customers. Patchwork web and cart plug-ins only add further complexity and stress.

Wasting staff time is costly, and it impacts your bottom line.

However, when you start wasting customer’s time, you move into a whole new universe of pain.

Customers who feel their time is being wasted by companies who don’t understand their needs, can’t find their information or put them on hold to “check another system” will go elsewhere to satisfy their needs and wants.

If your company churns through customers, your acquisition costs rise, your lifetime customer loyalty statistics fall, and you end up in a world of pain when it comes to trying to scale your business. Business owners know that multiple systems also introduce multiple places where something can go wrong. Research around the globe shows that e-commerce is not working, with climbing rates of cart abandonment and product returns at all-time highs.

Customer Commerce is the solution to these woes. Customer Commerce can offer you a scalable, affordable solution and move your business to a single system, where any staff member can find data on any customer and know it is up to date and correct. You will not have to pay staff to get disparate systems to talk to each other.

Best of all, your customers will love the fact that you know them, understand their needs and wants and that you can answer any query they have quickly and correctly. In short, their experience will be far superior to the current “e-commerce” way of doing business.

The State of the Connected Customer shows us that providing this outcome for customers is going to be beneficial for SMBs:

• Eighty-eight percent of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase again.
• Nearly half of customers — including three-fifths of millennials — are willing to pay extra for better customer service.

Happy customers become loyal customers, shooting your lifetime customer value, NPS scores and retention rates through the roof.

Spending less on humans trying to make computer systems talk to each other will drive down your staff costs.

Beyond the basics, Customer Commerce solutions also offer the ability to launch multiple stores, for multiple brands, and across multiple time zones and languages. It allows real-time stock management and integration with POS systems. Meaning, you can reach further into global markets both online and bricks-and-mortar, without adding any complexity to the Customer Commerce system that will be powering your business to the next level.

Prioritizing the customer, and treating their time like your own, by moving to a Customer Commerce solution is the way forward for SMBs.

Mikel Lindsaar, CEO and founder of StoreConnect, is an experienced technology entrepreneur whose mission is to infuse small and medium-sized businesses with the power to implement a successful Customer Commerce strategy whilst scaling to meet growing demand.

Small businesses are often driven by a purpose to help their customers, and not just to make money. However, they can’t waste time and money setting up their business on a platform only to repeat the process by changing platforms when they want to scale, nor do they want to waste time figuring out how to integrate multiple platforms. They are seeking to provide a seamless experience for their customers, and this is possible using StoreConnect.

StoreConnect (built on the World’s Number 1 CRM, Salesforce) gives clients a complete, powerful, configurable Customer Commerce solution where they can manage their website, online and in-store sales, provide amazing customer service, run all their digital marketing campaigns, and have up-to-date detailed metrics, reporting and full understanding of their customer.

StoreConnect was awarded Salesforce’s 2021 International Partner Innovation Award of the year for the Retail sector and is changing the ease with which small businesses are run — with a manageable price tag. StoreConnect is Time. Well spen