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NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> automation
ONLINE-ADS>> automation
Shar'n John Williams (accent_at_kdi.com)
Tue, 30 Dec 1997 12:27:05 -0600
Is Automation going too far?
As a marketer whose primary focus is building sales through improved
customer service, I am concerned about a continuing trend in business
communications toward automation overkill. The internet is particularly
vulnerable with the widespread availability of autosponders. I bring this up
because I was recently bombarded by mild complaint calls from several
customers who had grown highly aggitated at not being able to directly
communicate with one of the ISP's I had placed them with. Now our niche' is
one on one, personal communication so we naturally play into this
frustration by offering live people. And of course this is not practical for
all situations, thus the value and benefit of 'certain' kinds of automation.
(Effective use might be to automail medical forms for patients, or credit
application and so forth) But all too frequently, marketing folks attempt to
gain the same efficiency by automailing generic sales material in response
to a prospect inquiry. Sometimes this helps. Often, it does not. Remember,
the prospect has already spent at least some time on the company web page
browsing through sales material. And the purpose of this material is to
spark enough interest, curiousity and desire to motivate action. If your
prospect has gotten hot enough to actually establish two-way communication,
why turn him off with more force fed ads for your product? And why make him
work so hard to make a purchase? The hidden message is often this: We don't
care enough about you as a customer to actually communicate with you.
Once this message is received, the sale is lost. And the tremendous value
of the internet to enable two-way communication is now reduced to that of a
lone billboard on a country road, far away from the business it serves.
The solution? I'm hoping you have some ideas. In our small part of the
world, we counsel our clients to pick up the phone and immediately make a
courtesy call to anyone who attempts to contact them regarding product
information. Email is used as well together with well design web pages to
gain respective efficiencies, but our first priority is to let our prospects
(and future customers) know that someone in our business cares that he
invested his time with us and that we want his business.
in business in general, but I noticed a potentially disturbing trend in the
continuing progession toward automated communication. By that I mean the
packaged responses delivered by autosponder when a potential customer send
an inquiry.
Best Regards,
John Williams
824 W. 10th St #103
(512) 494-1411 FAX 494-1865
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