Find, f**k and forget

As soon as an order has been placed, sales people have been trained for generations to quickly move on to the next customer. Unfortunately, this way of working also seem to be the prevailing experience for online customers.

When shopping online we have all experienced that the price suddenly climbed dramatically when arriving at the checkout with our virtual shopping cart. Shipping, taxes and other unexpected fees can ruin any shopping experience.

To make matters worse, if you have ever tried to get some customer support after having bought something online, I would be very surprised if you received a treatment that was better than what you would normally expect in a physical shop.

Today it seems like most online businesses follow the infamous 3F sales strategy. They know how to target  new customers by using flashing adverts, pop-up windows or aggressive email marketing. Many online shops are naturally very keen to close the sale, but surprisingly few make an effort to keep the customer happy in the long run.

As long as responsibility for the online shop lies in either the marketing or sales department, the website will undoubtedly be fine-tuned to be good at either finding new customers or closing the sale. Different departments have different goals and they will try to use the web to help them meet their targets.

Even though the web is now 20 years old and e-business has been around for a long time, surprisingly few organisations have implemented improved ways to handle selling to existing customers and making the experience a good one.

We all know that it is cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to win a new one, so why not begin to act with a longer-term vision of life-time customer value? This way the “forget” could be turned into “forever”.

Thanks to Hannu Vangsgaard and Peter Vellenzer for valuable input.