Why Online Resources Add Value and Create a Competitive Advantage
"The customer is king" is one of the older cliches of modern business. While its never exactly false, the phrase usually pays lip service to the idea of customer experience rather than listening to feedback that results in change.
How does an online business make the most of customer feedback? One avenue to explore is the development of downloadable content, specifically audio, video and text resources that truly add value and give customers the experience they've asked for.
In today's business landscape, a customers are smart and have high expectations.
In the most basic form of customer experience, people have come to expect a seamless experience, regardless of which channel (live chat, telephone, email, online help) they choose to communicate with your organization. One-to-one communications with real, passionate people that work at a given company are the norm.
Blogs, podcasts and searchable FAQs are mandatory when providing knowledge about how to place an order or resolve a technical issue.
True that not everyone will be interested in subscribing to a daily blog post offering inspiring commentary, or education on-demand by means of free podcast, but there are those that will. And, it's those that do engage in the high-touch experience will be thankful that the resources were available.
For a small business, having the creative and technical know-how to create multimedia collateral is the first step. That's called production.
Next, a means of distributing the audio, video, text documents will be required in order to fulfill.
In practice, we've organized our resources in three categories which provide our customers with the opportunity to give us feedback.
AUDIO
All the podcasts are listed on a single page, with the most recent episode displayed with the podcast artwork, title and brief description of the show. By drilling deeper and clicking through to the individual episode, a customer can opt to subscribe to the podcast with iTunes.
Each episode includes show notes detailing what is being discusses during the podcast, as well as tags for quick reference and most importantly, a comment box giving the listener the chance to add their comments by typing in a few words.
VIDEO
The video area serves up tutorials and commercials. The tutorials walk you through how to use Voices.com, and on a more basic level, how to get started within the industry.
While the videos aren't much more than a narrated PowerPoint presentation, these embedded YouTube videos have been watched more than 50,000 in the past year alone.
TEXT
Aside from education and entertainment, most customers are looking for information in hopes of solving a specific problem. Enter the frequently asked questions. For this section of our "Help" page, we didn't just list the top 25 frequently asked questions, but rather developed an exhaustive knowledge base that we use both internally, and publish solutions, definitions, step-by-step guides on more than 500 topics within the field of voice-overs.
Customers can search by keyword and immediately see a list of matching solutions as well as a relevancy-match rating which suggests if the article has historically been helpful.
We commonly attach PDF documents such a voice-over rate sheets [pdf], user guides and other tip sheets to let users continue their experience offline.
As part of the feedback loop, customers can read if they found a specific solution helpful (a simple "Yes" or "No" works well) giving us some insight into what works, and which solutions need to be further researched or outright deleted.
WRAP-UP
Every business can add more value and meaning to their relationship with their customers. Creating, hosting and distributing online resources is a good place to start.
Remember to build-in a way to ask for and capture comments and other feedback from your customers. This information is extremely valuable as it will help you refine your materials and continue to be seen as one of the few online businesses that listens to their customers.
