- Chapter 2: What Customers Want
- Evaluate Competing Business and Products
- Select Products and Transact with E-Service Providers
- Get Help
- Provide Feedback
- Stay Tuned In as E-Custoners
- Seventeen Customer Directives
- This Better be Worth the Wait
- Tell Me What I Get if I Do This
- I'll ID Myself When I'm Ready
- Use What I Give You
- Let Me Build My Knowledge
- Let Me Make a Valid Comparison
- Don't Expect Me to Make a Decision Without the Facts
- Be Careful Second-Guessing My Needs
- Let Me Get to Where I Need to Go
- Yes, I Want it, Now What?
- Signpost My Journey
- Don't Lock Me Out
- Don't Limit My Choices
- Give Me Digestable Chunks
- Call a Spade a Spade
- Tell Me the Info You Need
- Don't Ignore Important Relationships
- Customers and Organizations
7. "Don't Expect Me to Make a Decision Without the Facts"
Customers are likely to feel like they're being subjected to a hard sell if they do not have sufficient information before being faced with a decision or an invitation to purchase. There will be some fundamental information that a customer wants before deciding whether to purchase. The nature of these fundamentals will depend on the service being offered.
Blunders
Inappropriate timing
Consider a customer who is evaluating products offered by an electronics company. The customer interacts with a tool that helps them identify some solutions to common desktop publishing problems. By identifying with some problem scenarios, the customer receives some recommendations; a list of software and hardware products with a brief description of each product. Next to each product name is a button inviting the customer to "buy now." The customer feels uncomfortable with the process at this point because they don't feel they know enough about any of the products to purchase anything at that point.
Missing facts
Continuing the above scenario, the customer chooses to ignore the inappropriate invitation to "buy now" and clicks through to the product page for one of the recommended products, a printer. From the product page the customer clicks through to a page that allows them to choose the printer model. Here they are again invited to "buy now," but unfortunately no prices are given for the different printers, probably because each printer must be packaged with software, thus making each combination a different price. The customer feels they can't possibly purchase a printer without knowing how much it is going to cost, and they bail out of the process at that point.