As expectations surrounding customer experience within the consumer electronics industry rise, the sector stands at a crossroads. As a vertical that typically operates within an omnichannel model, and which frequently depends heavily upon healthy channel partnerships or resellers, there’s a distinct need to control customer experience and service across a wide range of channels.
While this might at first seem to pose a challenge, in truth, it’s a considerable opportunity. 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Customer service is an area in which brands can ensure they differentiate and outclass close competition – critical in this competitive and fast-moving industry.
In this article, we’ll explore three key areas in which consumer electronics brands can improve their offering and stand out via exemplary customer service.
1. Omniscient Sales Teams
Quick answers matter when it comes to consumer electronics. Competition is high and other alternatives are readily available, so there’s a need to provide prompt assistance when customers are delaying a purchase to get answers to technical questions.
While lots of attention is paid to the evolution of technology that helps rapidly respond to queries (chatbots etc) there’s less focus on improving the actual content and insight given to customers when help is provided.
This is where access to product information comes in. With access to a high-quality PIM platform like Effectus Content Platform, customer service teams can find accurate information about products quickly and reliably. This is especially important for a sector like consumer electronics, where so many attributes and technical features come into play – and where accuracy is key to ensure compatibility and suitability of products offered.
As customer service tech evolves (for example, as video chat becomes more common) there will be even more need for instant access to product information to enable naturally paced, face-to-face conversations.
2. More Empowered Purchase Decisions
When looking to improve the customer experience within the consumer electronics sector, it’s important to consider the likely mindset. Electronics purchases are typically bought with less frequency and at a higher price point. These are not overly spontaneous sales – customers want to be sure they’re making the right decision and may be looking for specific information to help them conduct product comparisons.
Reaching out to your customer service team for help should be a last resort. When it comes to seamless customer experience, it’s much better to have “self-service” access to the answers they need, quickly – and this can be achieved via well-populated product pages.
It’s a great practice to observe, but it does necessitate close control of your PIM and DAM, as well as the ability to spot gaps in content quality and update pages that might be lacking detail or underperforming. ECP can help here, with automated quality control checks run across all of your inventory, and alerting you to the pages where content quality falls below acceptable levels – meaning you can take targeted action.
In the future, as customers start to we can expect even more information to be expected/required – new ways of experiencing a product before purchase (i.e. Augmented Reality.)
3. A Sense Of Consistency
Selling across a wide range of channels means the need to maintain a sense of consistency. Strong brand control is essential if you’re going to deliver a reassuring and familiar customer experience.
Ensure that your various public-facing teams are well connected. If a question can’t be answered by your social media team, for example, it’s important that you have a way to triage this to another expert team who can handle the query.
Similarly, it’s important to maintain product information consistency across channels to reduce confusion and doubt, which could lead to a reluctance to purchase. If a consumer experiences a product with one set of photography in a social channel, but later looks for the same product on your website and sees a new set, they may be put off and conversion opportunities will be missed.
Solve this problem by working with a PIM and DAM platform that can help achieve consistency across all channels, and leverage dual syndication to ensure that the most up-to-date assets can always be pulled from supplier’s catalogs.
Consumer Electronics: The Future’s Electric
Customer service should start before a problem arises – the concept of self-service is essential when it comes to the digital showrooms of the consumer electronics sector, as we allow our customers to learn, compare and assess the suitability of products on offer.
When a more pressing issue is encountered, customers should be able to easily contact a well-informed representative who has well-ordered product info at their fingertips. By taking care to ensure that our teams have access to all the information they need to deliver exemplary service, we can expect to retain more satisfied customers. When it comes to future-proofing customer experience and loyalty within the consumer electronics space, proactivity is key.
