Customer blog services
Customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):
1. Researching product information (90%)
2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
3. Contacting customer service (56%)
4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
5. Checking product availability (36%)
Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?
| 1. | A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy. |
| 2. | This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system. Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption. |
| 3. | Contacting customer service on most sites is painful. Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones). A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog. The question, including keywords, is the title of the post. The answer is the response. |
| 4. | Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.). A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice. |
| 5. | New products should be hyped via a weblog. Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts. A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability. |
From John Robb