In the last few months, many employers have decided that it’s time to “take a stand” on remote work. In the red corner, we have organizations like Tesla demanding that employees return to the office or be fired. In the blue, organizations like Twitter (ah the irony) loudly proclaiming that employees can work from anywhere forever. Somewhere in the middle are organizations like JP Morgan Chase, who started somewhere close to Elon, only to backtrack when employees threatened to revolt.

Regardless of whether it is good for them or not (and there is legitimate debate about that), when you ask employees if they want the option to work out of the office, majority say “YES”. It turns out that if you give people a taste of freedom (in this case in terms of choosing how and where they work) they prefer that to control. Who would have thought it?

For two years we’ve been asking employers a simple question – “How do you feel about your employees working out of the office?” The question IS simple, but often the answer is anything but simple. As a sample, here are some of the more interesting answers we’ve received….

“It’s the best thing we’ve ever done”

“It’s the WORST thing we ever did”

“It’s creating stronger teams”

“It’s tearing teams apart”

“I think it’s terrible, but if I bring my employees back they will all quit”

“I think my employees are always slacking off, but I still have to pay them”and perhaps most commonly

“I just don’t know what to do about it”

It varies by industry, At BillionMinds they are seeing fewer than 20% of employers fully embracing a hybrid work policy that includes out of office for anyone that wants it and who’s job allows it, forever. Many more are sitting on the sidelines, perhaps until the power dynamic shifts between employer and employee again and they can pull employees back in without penalty.

That might work temporarily, but it’s probably pretty foolish to make a medium term bet against history and human nature. If you don’t offer me the chance to work from anywhere, I’ll find an employer who does, and guess what, I won’t even have to move house to do it!

So, if you are an employer it’s probably time to go beyond gut instinct, and start thinking about how to implement a hybrid workplace policy that works for your organization today and will work going forward. But how do you get started?

We recommend it starts with what a Space and Time Profile – an audit of your current environment to determine which roles are tightly coupled to a traditional work structure across the dimensions space and time.

The Space Dimension

In your workplace, how many roles MUST be tied to location?

According to BillionMinds.com it can be 3 dimensions: 1. If you work in a factory, its likely that there is some equipment you interact with which would look awkward at best in your dining room. It just wont’ work. 2. even when a role can be done remotely, there may be good business reasons for it to need certain types of role in a physical workplace. It’s possible to have bookstores that are entirely online, but an independent bookstore with a cool location and nice couches is likely to do much better fending off competition from Amazon than an online clone. 3. This third role what´s causing it to be in office is culture. Like call centers. In most cases it is cheaper and more efficient to run virtual call centers, but many organizations still have physical ones, just because they always have!

The Time Dimension

In your workplace, how many roles MUST be done at a certain time?

If you are a software company offering technical support during certain hours, working outside those hours doesn’t really make any sense. If you are a Radio presenter on a live show, you probably need to be on time..Again there are also business reasons why working something approximating fixed hours makes sense. For example, if a large part of your work requires real time collaboration with others you need to be working at the same time as your collaborators.

There are potentially many roles where the only reason time constraints are observed is culture or policy. For example you may individual software developers that COULD work any time, but who are encouraged to abide by traditional office hours.

Creating an Organizational Profile

Once you have evaluated your organization across space and time, you are now in a position to create your “Space and Time Profile”, based on these two different dimensions in your organization.

Business Profile 1 – The Nomad

To illustrate this, consider two different types of organization (in this case categorized by percentage of employees in each category). The first category, we’ll call “The Nomad”. This organization has a large proportion of its employees who are not tied to the work environment at all, by either time OR place. The organization therefore has a high degree of flexibility in terms of its hybrid work policy.

Business Profile 2 – The Settler

The second category, which we will call “The Settler” has far more employees who for business reasons, or logistical reasons are tied through either time or place. This organization probably needs a different set of policies that will work for them, most likely centered around meeting the needs of those employees.

Cultural Impact

The organizational profile we described above helps you take the emotion out of WHAT is possible, but making changes requires a detailed assessment of the current culture and what kind of change will work best. For example that just because 80% of your workforce may want to work out of the office, losing the other 20% could be devastating to your business. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the desire to work in or out of the office is strongly influenced by how many of your colleagues are doing the same.

As you do this, you should consider what your business currently needs, what it will need in the future, the preferences of people who currently work for you, and the preferences of people who COULD be working for you in the future.

Skill and Trust – The Missing Link

If you give employees the practical skills they need to work from anywhere with excellence, and then trust them to do so – the vast majority respond in ways that benefit the business – with improved individual and team performance, reduced ethical violations and better business results.

Continue Reading at BillionMinds.com

Reference:

The Space and Time profile – A new hybrid workplace model for employers. (2022, August 3). BillionMinds. https://billionminds.com/the-space-and-time-profile-a-new-hybrid-workplace-model-for-employers/

Here are five simple recommendations we make to organizations we work with that are serious about helping their employees be more effective.

Step 1 – Reexamine Readiness

In the workplace, we often think of readiness as a set of skills that are associated with a particular job. Managers get manager training, sales people get sales training and so on. These things are important of course, but ignore the fundamental people need to be effective. To try to resolve this, over the past few years, many organizations have turned to mindset training – designed to infuse characteristics such as Grit and Growth Mindset.

What is missing in many organizations is practical skills training to help people be more effective, and particularly to optimize their day – to move from surviving to thriving in the reality of an unstructured, ambiguous workplace.

We need to help our employees navigate that change, and provide the right education, support and accountability to do so. Personal effectiveness is something you can measure as you hire someone, but it’s also something you can build and maintain in your existing workforce.

Step 2: Consider the Whole Person

According to the opinion of BillionMinds work life balance is so 2010s. The very idea that you have a balance with work on one side and non-work on the other is kind of ludicrous when work and our non-work environments are basically merging together. Your employees ARE parents, partners, friends, and in some cases they have one or two other jobs in addition to yours. If we can give people the tools to do that, they will show up more present at work, do better work, and be more committed to their employer as a result.

Step 3: Emphasize Rest

Whether employees will rest adequately depends HUGELY on culture. On a day to day basis, if the CEO and executive team are seen to be working all hours, so will the vast majority of people in the company. This extends particularly to policies such as unlimited PTO, where in many cases people end up taking LESS time than they would with traditional policies.

More broadly, every time a manager sends an e-mail out of hours, or lauds an employee for working weekends, they are subtly reducing the normal amount of rest in the company. So if you really want to change the norm, consider policies that strongly encourage rest – including more radical solutions such as cash bonuses for taking vacation, and 4 day work weeks. After all, the workplace has changed dramatically since working hours norms were established, and most of us work outside those hours anyway….

Step 4: Recreate daily structure

In many workplaces, we shifted from 9-5 to flextime, and more recently, completely flexible hours, where traditional work hours and meetings with others create a loose agreed upon expected time window when people work. This of course gives people more flexibility, but it also puts the onus almost completely on the employee to figure out how to be effective. In the absence of any structure or processes, all employees have as guidance is the culture of the organization.

According to BillionMinds (2021) some options to help employees to have daily structure is to schedule brief morning standups and evening reviews to have a start to end day. Also they comment to bring back break rooms so that the leaders can meet with the employees so they can follow some behaviors.

The goal here should not be to impose a structure and force everyone to conform, but rather to make it easier for people to create their own structure and repeatable method that is sustainable.

Step 5: Help Employees Find Their Why

In an unstructured ambiguous world of work this last recommendation may be the most important. Perhaps the biggest single challenge with unstructured ambiguous work is understanding WHY we do what we do. Most companies shortcut this badly and just pass the responsibility down to managers.

Continue reading at BillionMinds

Reference:

5 steps to a more effective workplace. (2021, July 21). BillionMinds. https://billionminds.com/effective-workplace/

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

As part of my series about the “How To Create A Fantastic Retail Experience That Keeps Bringing Customers Back For More”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Junge, an MIT/Kellogg-educated Business Strategy expert in high-tech that has worked with companies ranging from new startups to Microsoft, to craft and execute successful growth strategies. He is currently CEO of PointerTop, an innovative Remote Sales and Service Software company based in Scottsdale, AZ.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve always been a tech geek, graduating from MIT with degrees in engineering and MIS, and fell in love with entrepreneurship from my father who was always inventing new technological solutions to business problems. I worked for a consulting company straight out of college and did so to gain the knowledge and experience to eventually launch a business of my own, while I also waited to come up with an idea worthy of its own customers.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

My biggest mistake with one of my first businesses was reducing our brand name from a two-word descriptive name to a one-word, abstract name since that was the fad, made for easier publishing and signage, and seemed “stickier”. I quickly learned that when it comes to retail, clear and simple messaging always wins the day. Branding is a long-term and expensive exercise, and it helps when your brand name is obvious.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

My best friend from college has always been there to support me in every project I’ve undertaken in my adult life, no matter how crazy or difficult. Being Greek, he lives and breathes the Socratic method, and keeps me honest along the way. The last time he helped me was when I was having a difficult time coming up with a name and slogan for our flagship product since the concept was so new and broad in its capabilities; we had to educate and market at the same time. So, on his advice I travelled away from the office to get a fresh perspective, isolated ourselves in a hotel conference room, and went through a few hours of brainstorming, refining, and testing until we landed on something we felt thread the needle: CrozTop, Cross-Interactive Websites!

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

My favorite author is Dostoevsky, and his The Brothers Karamazov was especially impactful. The author in general, and this book in particular, impressed upon me the importance of the individual and his specific experiences to the meaning of life and society, even business. Every human interaction, including business transactions, is an opportunity to add meaning and value to someone’s life. Great companies are those that design their visions, products, and services with that impact in mind.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

At our company we insist that our product and customer-facing employees be themselves customers of our own products and services to understand the issues, problems, and concerns our customers face, and try to fix them before they even arise. The most remarkable aspect of having your employees as customers is that if and when they leave, they’ve become so comfortable with the company’s products and services and such believers in them that they often hire us afterwards as real customers and wind up becoming evangelizers.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

The worst form of business anxiety I’ve experienced as an executive is when looking over my shoulder at the competition. Although I do believe it is important to keep the competition in view, especially to stay on top of new industry ideas and concepts, it is more important to focus on the company itself and its customers and the ongoing balance between value delivery, pricing, and sales. Focusing on the competition is a defensive tactic that will drain any executive of energy and motivation, whereas focusing on customer value is an offensive tactic that can inspire.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. The Pandemic only made things much worse for retailers in general. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

Key to retailer success in the long-term is to focus on points of specialization that make the retailer unique enough to its target market to justify higher margins when compared to the discounters or ecommerce. Retailers can use their market knowledge, experience, and expertise to build themed communities and not just stores, supplying expert advice, value-adding bundles, and community forums and events, for example. Home Depot, Lululemon, and REI are great examples of retailers that have focused on building experiential stores that cater to an industry where customers go to have their problems solved, rather than to just “shop”.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumercompanies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

US-based retailers have several advantages they can use to stand out in the marketplace, especially against foreign Direct-to-Consumer companies and Amazon. High among their advantages are their brick-and-mortar locations or close proximity to their customers. Retailers can merge their customer-facing operations between their physical presence and their web presence to create a coordinated and superior customer service experience that together is more convenient and impactful for the customer (for example, by making the return process more convenient and more prone to non-return resolutions). D2C companies will compete on price, and Amazon will compete with automation; national retailers must then deliver superior service quality, specialization, and/or customer experiences as an alternative.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a retail business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

The biggest mistake I see retail companies make is to expand too rapidly, whether a company’s product and service selection, its target market, or its footprint, only to see quality and margins suffer. Key to avoiding this mistake is for a CEO to develop a detailed business plan, maintain it, and diligently follow its brand messaging and ROI requirements when considering new expansions. If a product, service, or new location does not fit within the brand or is not generating the required returns, then shut them down. Knowing when to say “NO”, and saying it often, is a critical skill for a CEO.

This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business in general and for retail in particular?

To compete in the business world, and especially in retail, a brand must be “Top-of-Mind” for consumers to visit them when a need arises. A brand must either have a strong emotional attachment (or be a recent presence) to a consumer for it to surface above the noise, and that emotional attachment is usually derived from a unique and/or exceptional service experience. Advertising often and across several channels will help with the recency effect, but much more impactful and lasting would be to develop a strong bond between the customer and the brand via powerful customer experiences.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

Customer Service delivery as a corporate strategy cuts across multiple company departments and competencies, making it difficult to plan, coordinate, and execute. Good customer service requires proper planning and positioning with the product or service being offered (Product Engineering and Marketing); proper staff hiring and training (HR); proper channel development (IT); and proper enforcement and follow-up (Customer-Facing Operations). Most large corporations are calcified by their organizational silos and have difficulties implementing cross-organizational strategies, so their customer service wounds up being delivered as an afterthought and in a disorganized manner. On the other hand, smaller companies can seldom find the time or managerial competency to properly bake their customer service strategies. Excellent, well-planned, and well-executed Customer Service is rare and a true path to differentiation.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

We had an elderly customer acquire a warranty service at the store but forgot to sign the warranty contract. He was unwilling to return to the store to sign the contract and did not know how to use email. We were able to service the customer at his home via our website using the CrozTop eSignature tool and have him sign the contract using his cellphone. He was grateful and surprised by how quickly and easily we were able to assist him.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

Our company quickly learned that we had to be able to service all types of customers by using and integrating our different channels. Some customers prefer to do things by themselves and be left alone, whereas others prefer handholding. Either way we learned that we needed to use technology to help every type of customer wherever they came in contact with us. Today’s technology allows for greater customer convenience and customers will shop around until they find what they want.

A fantastic retail experience isn’t just one specific thing. It can be a composite of many different subtle elements fused together. Can you help us break down and identify the different ingredients that come together to create a “fantastic retail experience”?

A ”fantastic” retail experience doesn’t happen by accident but has to be designed, planned, and executed, and it must start with the brand vision and message. Every aspect of the retail experience must reinforce the brand, starting with the advertising mix and content; the aesthetic theme of the stores; the service levels and availability; the product and service offerings; and post-purchase follow-through. All aspects must match and reinforce each other and the brand to avoid customer confusion and to get to top-of-mind.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.

If you want to be able to succeed in retail, first order of business would be to clearly define your brand vision and message. Confused customers are lost customers, so your aesthetics, products, operations, and service levels must all match and reinforce each other.

Second is to define your target customer demographic and ideal persona to ensure that your marketing is focused and effective.

The third order of business is understanding that the process is the result. To get consistent revenues, margins, growth, and satisfaction, you must have consistent, well-designed, and well-understood processes in place for everyone to follow globally. Metrics and statistics are great in-so far as they are tools for adjusting and fine-tuning company processes but should not be meant to be end-consumables in-and-of themselves.

The fourth order of business follows from the third which is that although an executive’s focus should be on processes, a manager’s focus should be on his employees.

Fifth is that the employee’s focus should be on the customer. A manager needs to understand his customers to execute the proper employee hiring, training, and compensation plans to deliver the most value to them and the largest margin to the company, but the employees are the vehicles to meeting those goals and thus must be his focus. Well-hired, well-trained, well-compensated employees focused on their customers will yield fantastic results. Common business knowledge states that for the company the customer always comes first; but that is a recipe for inconsistency and chaos and puts the cart before the horse. Happy customers come from productive employees which come from fluid processes.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 

Our company PointerTopwas created with just such a movement in mind — to create humanistic technology. Humans are naturally social, individualistic, and creative beings meant to extract meaning by interacting with each other. Using Automation or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to knock out human agents from commercial interactions misses the point of human interaction in general (to derive meaning from other humans), and misses the potential productivity derived from human creativity specifically. The real potential behind AI is to make human interaction faster, cheaper, more productive, and more convenient, but not to replace it. Our platform CrozTopwas designed with these benefits specifically in mind; to allow consumers to navigate websites productively with the assistance of automation when needed and for as long as possible, and then integrate human agents at the end to finish the transaction to increase satisfaction, basket size, and perform essential consumer education. The end-result is a happier, better-educated customer spending more money when compared to a self-navigating customer, and with far less labor involvement when compared to a call center transaction.

How can our readers further follow your work?

All my posts, articles, and interviews can be found at https://news.webtoq.com/, and my book “Why Freedom” can be found on Amazon.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

Original story from Authority Magazine

To win a sale a product must be at the top of the consumer’s mind at the time of consumption; the consumer needs to be thinking of the product when making his purchasing decision to consider it and then pull the trigger. So, the question for marketers then is, how do you get to be top-of-mind at the right time? The answer is simple, but the execution is not. For products to be, or to rise, to top-of-mind at the time of consumption, products must be (i) recently seen; (ii) the brand must be intimately connected to the need in the consumer’s mind; or (iii) the consumer must have a strong emotional connection to the brand.

Points (i) and (ii) involve marketing strategy and advertising volume and quality, while point (iii) involves creating marketing experiences for audiences. Creating experiences is more than just marketing, but also involves product or service delivery and customer operations, which means a higher level of corporate strategizing and coordination among multiple corporate departments. The definition, creation, and execution of the customer experience is difficult to implement because of its complexity and explains why most companies get it wrong, especially the big ones.

Our new digitized world has warped corporate marketing strategies, growing larger digital branding and advertising budgets at the expense of the digital customer experience, where the focus has been on using technology to reduce expenses; these companies are taking money out of strategy (iii) to reduce overall expenses, but adding some back into strategies (i) and (ii) to compensate. This expense reduction has largely been done by removing the human interaction from the customer experience and replacing them with bots, AI, and self-help tools, at the expense of the customer’s time and service quality. Customers are frustrated with convoluted or non-existent support processes, and companies continue to frustrate their customers because they believe that pricing and better social media are the only ways to compete in today’s world. However, Starbucks would have ceased to exist if that were true; people are willing to purchase a $5 coffee to get the total Starbucks experience, and our new digitized world has not changed that. Exchanging the baristas and comfortable couches for automated kiosks would destroy the experience and the brand.

At WebToq we believe the real value of AI is not to remove the human experience, but to focus and enhance it; to use AI to make the sales and support process faster and more effective via data sharing, processing, and delivery to both the support agent and the customer. Think of how Starbucks uses a mobile app to share their menu and allow people to pre-order their drinks before going into the store, mixing technology with human delivery for a more effective solution; WebToq is busy inventing similar tactics online. The customer experience is the last interaction a customer will have with a brand, and if it involves a human interaction, it will be the most emotional, and thus the most memorable because of both the recency and strength of the memory.

We believe the companies of the future will use focused human interaction as the primary way to differentiate their brand, rather than relying only on marketing. After all, when all other companies have forced their customers to IVR bots and self-help wikis, it’s the company with the warm and personalized delivery that will stand out.

Are you WebToq’ing yet?

22 years after the Dot.Com bust and there are still armies of would-be entrepreneurs looking to build eCommerce businesses by throwing together a catalogue of drop-ship products, electronic shopping carts, and customer review systems, thinking that this lean business model will allow them to compete successfully on price and become digital millionaires. It is actually quite easy nowadays to build an eCommerce business using online templates and plug-and-play modules; however it is exactly because it is easy to do, building these lean-template businesses, that makes it difficult to differentiate, defend, and ultimately make profitable.

It is accepted, albeit controversial dogma in business school that Discount Pricing is not a strategy, but a tactic. Michael Porter, the godfather of contemporary business strategy, made the case that competing solely on price was a tactic that was easily copied, since any business could reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost volumes, without being able to build some sort of defendable walls to keep competitors away. These walls take time, effort, and/or capital to build, grow, and reinforce for the business behind the walls to be protected from competition so they can raise prices, and ultimately raise margins.

Strong brands, unique services and service delivery, intellectual property, unique resources, and unique talents are among many ways of adding extra value for the consumer and building defendable walls that make, mark, and show a difference for the business, its services, and its products versus those of competitors’. These value-adds bring in the consumer while the walls make it difficult for competitors to copy and compete with the business. But again, those walls or barriers to competition take money to create and grow, which means higher expenses, which then means higher prices and hopefully higher margins as well.

Apple with its strong brand; Starbucks with its unique service; Microsoft with its patents; and LVMH with its unique talents all command high prices and very high margins. They are highly differentiated businesses with highly defendable competitive positions. Whether traditional or digital, businesses need to find a defendable way to be different from the competition; a way to be able to add extra value to the consumer so they can justify higher margins and higher prices.

Want to know how to build a value-added and defendable digital strategy? Talk to one of our agents.

Are you WebToq’ing yet?

Back in the late 80’s and 90’s discount marts and big box stores raced to the bottom of retail pricing. Still the retail world is still trying to get its bearings. Walmart, the movement’s juggernaut, innovated supply chains, distribution, inventory management, and operational execution to constantly reduce prices, and did it so well that it became a de facto strategy.  Retailers across the US, as well as suppliers and manufacturers working to meet the new demands of retailers, had adjust to this race-to-the-bottom, as consumers then came to expect ever decreasing prices.

The race-to-the-bottom only got worse in the 2000’s and 2010’s as Amazon and other online retailers used digital efficiencies and self-serve business models to increase selection while decreasing prices. Once again, discount pricing became a de facto strategy online, and consumers were habituated into expecting lower and lower prices.

Students of business, however, are taught that Discount Pricing is not a long-term business strategy, but rather a medium-term business tactic. You can win over customers in the medium-term by reducing costs and lowering prices, but eventually competitors will be able to copy what you do, and there is a limit to how many expenses you can wring from your operations.

Discount Pricing as a strategy or tactic

Discount Pricing as a strategy or tactic is a debatable point, but what is not debatable is that the end-result of solely competing on price leads to smaller margins and profitability. As companies cut ever more non-essential expenses from their operations to continue competing on price, eventually will run out of those expenses and will have to turn to essential expenses. What are those essential expenses? (i) Value-adding operations and (ii) margins. Cutting value-adding operations turns a business into a bland, vanilla commodity with only price as a source of differentiation and only volume-growth as a success strategy. And cutting margins, well that’s no business at all.

Because of Amazon’s online success, digital commerce to date has focused on web technologies that boost efficiencies. Such as eCarts, aggregated reviews, community support pages, chatbots, and other tools to make self-serve the driving force in eCommerce. ECommerce has thrived under this self-serve paradigm, growing exponentially in the last 20 years. But, like the Big Box trend before it, self-serve eCommerce has led to commoditization, low quality products and services, and increasing customer frustration.

How do you get out of the online race-to-the-bottom? 

How is a company that offers Premium Customer Service supposed to compete on the web? Do complex products with fine and detailed sales benefits processed online? How do you extend your luxury brand to the cloud, maintaining that sense of luxury as a point of differentiation?

In other words, how do you get out of the online race-to-the-bottom? The answer, of course, is a platform that reimagines the warmth and dynamism of a face-to-face experience and applies it to the cloud. A platform with instant video communications, showing faces and imparting emotions; a platform with video-and-presentation sharing for maximum impact. A platform with on-the-spot quotes and contract eSigning for instant gratification; and more.

The answer is a platform that allows well-trained representatives to show off their smiles, their knowledge, and their competence to their customers to create a unique, differentiated, and ultimately brandable experience. The answer to the tactic that races prices to the bottom is a strategy that elevates the customer experience to the top. A strategy brought to you by WebToq!

Everything in this life can be measured in terms of opportunities. And it is that, if you do not take them, they will pass you by as if they were flashes of shooting stars. The same thing happens when you have a business. There is always the possibility of selling your product, at the price you want, to the right person.

The problem is that it is very rare that the stars align so that someone is interested in the service you offer, at just the right moment. Any distraction and your client is already in another universe, looking for another brand or some other way to acquire the same product. It is for this simple reason that today, with so much competition, you need to look for other tools that offer personalized attention, and thus be able to make the most of your business.

How to Offer Personalized Attention?

Many choose to hire an external company or a call center to be able to finish capturing customers and make a sale. But you will know from experience that this tool can be a bit of a hassle, as well as being very expensive.

We have all received a thousand and one calls, and we no longer know what excuses to invent to get rid of the telephone agents. For this reason many people prefer not to call anymore. It is as if they have control of our life and there is not much we can do about it. So having this one option is no longer enough.

Another way to offer personalized attention is through chatbots. You must also know them. They are those little robots that answer on some internet pages, but then they don’t understand us very well and give us programmed and unhelpful answers.

Due to the lack of tools that offer good customer support, a software called WebToq emerged. This tool solves the limitations of chat and call center and adds new features that make customer service super personalized! Read on to find out how it works.

Click here for more information

WebToq: Convert Visitors Into Buyers

Imagine that your customers can come to your website looking for information and an online agent advises them on the information they are looking for and finds personalized solutions right then and there, without leaving the website. No need to call or do lengthy research! What’s more, imagine that the agent can exchange videos, images, and files with this online client to get exactly where he wanted.

This is WebToq. This company recently emerged to help those companies that are struggling with the limitations of their call center or that simply offer more complicated products or services than what can be sold with an online shopping cart.

It is an advanced tool that combines various software in order to offer more than just customer service. It is an experience never seen before!

Now you can turn your website into a sales and service channel where you can advise your customers as if they were in front of you. They just enter the page, start looking for information and that’s it! There are online agents to support, advise, and sell.

Chatbots and Chats vs. WebToq

The advantages offered by WebToq are much more advanced than those of a common chat.

The problem

In the first place, users will be speaking with an agent, that is, a person from your same company and not with programmed software, so the language becomes a little more human and warm. If the client requests something specific, your agent will know what to answer.

On the other hand, a traditional chat becomes a one-dimensional communication, that is, only text. Which makes the customer get bored, lose patience and, therefore, abandon the purchase process.

The solution

With WebToq, the conversation is much more versatile and dynamic, because beyond sending videos or directing the user to a specific search, it is possible to carry out a personalized and live session from the same website. Without asking the customer to download another app or open another browser tab. Nowadays, a human interaction that clarifies doubts could be the key to success in each sale.

In addition to chatting online with the agent to ask for help, WebToq also sends specific questionnaires, images, videos and audios, to find out which product best suits the user’s needs.

The user can also submit their own images to refer to what they are looking for. For example, you want to buy cable, but you don’t know which package or special is right for you. Maybe you want a car with functions to prevent accidents and you don’t know which model is the right one. Maybe you enter a realtor’s page and you prefer to be shown images and photos of houses instead of you looking for them. For these situations there is WebToq. The system allows the agent to send questionnaires in order to find the ideal product according to the needs and tastes of each visitor.

What makes it unique is that the user does not need to download any application or have a registration to access the tool. For example, GoToMeeting allows you to link online, but you need to register the conference beforehand and go to a new web page or app. .

The essential difference is that WebToq will already be installed within your page. This is because it is an integrated service called SAAS (Software As A Service for its figures in English). In this way, users will be able to communicate with you directly, send you messages, images, questionnaires and videos, at a very affordable price!

This way you will convert your visitors into buyers. They will not have to leave your page, nor search for a product for hours, much less depend on a call.

Click here to get this tool now.

Don’t Just Sell, Help

Consider that the more you know your users, the more you can help them become profitable and loyal customers.

Another mistake that is often made in customer service, especially in the digital part, is that the user is treated as just another number, or worse, like everyone else. This is one way of letting go of that precious opportunity to earn a customer’s loyalty. You must not allow it!

Offers a Unique Experience

Each customer is unique, and the best way to make a sale is to offer a personalized experience. Depending on the line of business, you must adapt the tools so that you impress all your customers.

To do this, WebToq developed software that allows you to modify the interface so that you can manage it in the way that best suits you. With this tool, you can place videos and links in such a way that your client does not waste time looking for a service.

For example, if you are a company that sells television services, you can send surveys to users so that you can recommend the right package. If you are a realtor you can send them videos or images of the houses as well as your own video tutorials explaining the process of buying or selling a house. You can let your imagination run wild and use WebToq to make it easy for your user to buy on the spot.

How does it work?

WebToq uses pre-made pages that you can choose from to suit your customers. These pages form a kind of “storyboard” or guide that is in the cloud.

This storyboard will be like the Bible for your sales, since it will establish the steps to follow in the customer service procedure. Thus, any member of your company or agent will be able to secure a purchase from your website, without having to direct the customer to a specific department. Amazing, don’t you think?

Note that this feature is only visible to employee

Try a Free Trial

WebToq has free trials and plans for all types of businesses. In addition to offering training so that your staff knows all the functions and makes the most of them. The quote is free and right now they are offering discounts so you can discover the wonders of this tool.

Innovate your business and increase your sales. Do not miss the opportunity. The moment is today.

Click here to try this tool.

Price

Costs vary depending on the number of customers you serve at the time. For example, there are companies that need 3 or 4 agents at the same time to answer different calls and thus not lose any customers. For this, there are different WebToq packages that are quite accessible and that adapt to the needs of your company.

Click here to see their prices.

HIGH-TOUCH INDUSTRIES AT A DISADVANTAGE IN ECOMMERCE

High-touch industries such as B2B software, real estate, and telecommunications, that require the engagement of an virtual agent to sell and/ or service their products and services have been largely left behind by ecommerce technology, while low-touch industries such as books, apparel, electronics, and others thrive with continually evolving technologies.

Do-it-yourself website companies such as Shopify and Weebly are rife with shopping carts, inventory management, and similar solutions that assist users in building low-touch ecommerce sites quickly and efficiently. But when it comes to high-touch industries, these websites are largely relegated to informational portals that are constructed to lead customers to off-line communications such as email, calls, and store visits.  

INCREASING DEMAND FROM CUSTOMERS FOR ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

Customers today are increasingly demanding that their commercial needs be met online as they look for faster and easier ways to shop for products and services. Global retail ecommerce grew at an astonishing rate of 24.6% in 2021 and took up 11.7% of the total retail market^[i]. Every day we find more examples of companies such as Amazon and EBay displacing traditional or brick-and-mortar counterparts as these counterparts are forced to retrench or restructure.

Similarly, customers are demanding online engagement with conversational marketing from high-touch service industries, and these industries are responding with omnichannel solutions such as integrated virtual assistants, apps, live chat software, digital marketing tools and self-guided support. However, regardless of these advancements, these industries continue to rely on in-person visits and call centers to close deals and provide support.

INCREASING DEMAND FROM BUSINESSES FOR ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

Businesses also are looking into increasing their online presence and evolve their technologies in order to (i) meet the increasing demand of their customers for online engagement, and (ii) to save money and increase productivity through cloud technologies.

Moving processes to the cloud saves businesses time and money as information becomes more available and synchronized; as customers engage the company’s support representatives less as they rely more on self-help technologies; and as customers become better informed with more timely and in-depth information. 

WEBTOQ’s PLATFORM ENABLES HIGH-TOUCH SALES AND SERVICE

WebToq is the solution that will enable businesses to move more of their customer-facing processes online, while improving productivity and meeting demand for online engagement at the same time. WebToq provides rich, on-demand, structured, and bidirectional communications between web user and agent that enable the sale and service of products and services online. 

• Rich communications: With WebToq agents can engage a customer in a video call and share multimedia communications such as documents, images, videos, questionnaires, VOIP calls, whiteboarding, and more, in the pursuit of a sale or support.
• On-demand: Agents are able to engage their customers directly through their website, rather than having to off-load the visit to a phone call or web conference. Contact is seamless and begins through the natural progression of a customer’s visit, whether when requesting specific information, an agent, live chat software, or initiating a sale.

• Structured: Unlike a web-conference where an agent has to put together information on the fly, WebToq’s agent platform is structured to follow a script, with all pertinent information pre-loaded and the steps pre-arranged. This allows for consistent quality in agent communications as the right information is available at the right time, with minimal searching and waiting.
• Bidirectional: Unlike co-browsing where an agent is merely assisting a customer through the navigation of a website and providing information to him, WebToq’s communications are bidirectional as the agent can receive questionnaire answers, files, voice and text, choice selections, and much more, that enable the closing of a sale or support case.

ONLINE ENGAGEMENT WILL REPRESENT A PRODUCTIVITY BOOST FOR HIGH-TOUCH COMPANIES

High-touch companies will see their productivity increase as they engage their customers online.

• These companies will now be able to handle multiple customer sessions at a time, rather than one-at-a-time as demanded with a call
• Off-load customer education and training to manuals and videos
• Handle a transaction all at once, rather than having to go back-and-forth between visits, calls, faxes, and emails
• Hire remote, stationary virtual agents only requiring writing fluency, rather than having to have local or traveling agents, or agents with perfect pronunciation and accents.

And, since WebToq is structured and pre-loaded, customer training will be quicker and easier, and customer sessions will be more consistent and effective.

HOW WEBTOQ WORKS

Original story from Advertising Week 360

Consumers are being barraged with advertising and branding messages online, which means businesses must rise above the noise to etch themselves in the minds of consumers to be top-of-mind at the time of consumption or get lost with the crowd. Businesses can execute two strategies to be top-of-mind: high-powered messaging or frequent messaging.

In this article, we will focus on high-powered messaging, although frequent messaging is rather straight forward as businesses engage in frequent, cross-channel advertising to catch the consumer near or at the point of consumption. High-powered experiences, on the other hand, are largely defined by the emotional impact felt by the consumer at the time of the experience, since the strength of memory, and therefore the strength of the attachment to a brand, is explicitly defined by the strength of the emotion felt in the instance of the experience. For an experience to be high-powered, it must be relevant and emotional.

So, how does a business make a digital experience high-powered?

1. Make it relevant. Businesses need to organize their websites based on the problems and demands of their customers, along with the proposed solutions, rather than along meaningless product categories or business departments. Consumers have reached a business because they feel a need or frustration; talk to those frustrations to catalyze the emotions behind them.
2. Add customer stories. Add customer testimonials and cases to your advertisements, websites, and landing pages as much as possible, focusing on short videos that talk to specific issues. You are more likely to connect to a lead if they can empathize with one of your videos.
3. Resolve customer issues quickly and completely. A company’s best chance to create an emotional impact is to resolve a customer’s issue to great satisfaction. Customers already start with an emotion, a negative one, which means the memory is already charged. They are annoyed or frustrated by an issue, and usually do not have great expectations since most companies fail to get this right. By resolving the issue to great satisfaction, you are embedding two emotions into the experience, the original frustration and the eventual satisfaction, and their contrast makes the experience stand out.

The third point is especially important online since most companies force a customer to switch channels if the contact originates online, to the customer’s frustration, forcing them to call in. Businesses should always meet the customer at the point of origination; face-to-face if they visit physically, via the phone if they call in, and virtually if on the website. Chat boxes are helpful in this regard, but we have witnessed the best results when businesses use cross-interactive platforms such as CrozTop to communicate with the customer, which allows instant bonding and resolution via video calling and media sharing.

To become top-of-mind, a brand must deliver high-powered experiences to audiences or messages frequently. Mastering high-powered experiences online are rarely done well, conveying an explicit advantage to those companies that do.

About the author:

Jason Junge is an MIT/Kellogg-educated Business Strategy expert in high-tech that has worked with companies ranging from new startups to Microsoft, to craft and execute successful growth strategies. He is currently CEO of PointerTop, an innovative Remote Sales and Service Software company based in Tempe, AZ.