For General Electric to have a successful implantation of the e-commerce tactics, they had to overcome some cultural issues. General Electric had also to ensure that their operations would run smoothly and to be able to build good relationships with their customers. What General Electric has done in the past was they would keep a large sales staff to help customers with their purchase of General Electric products. With the introduction of the internet and General Electric new e-business, the sales staff had become worried that they might lose their jobs because of the internet and they feeling not needed. What General Electric did to help overcome this misconception, they offered bonuses to anyone on the sales staff that helped the customers buy over the internet. They help make the staff understand how the internet can benefit them and the company as a whole and this calmed down the sales staff.
With the sales of home appliances, it has become a very completive market with sales and reduce pricing on most to all appliance that anyone sales and a web presence is essential to have within this market. In today’s market though, having just one centralized website will not due and General Electric understood this and General Electric wanted to give each store the ability to sell on the internet to their customers in there general location. With each store having its own website, they should be able to manipulate the website to reflect their own personal pricing of the appliances along with advertising and home delivery terms and conditions. General Electric decided that the website drive by the postal code, meaning customers find their local General Electric store by their postal zip code. Once you are on that particular website, the website offers the traditional search and select stores, gives product details, you can compare modes and so on, but you would be offered that particular store price and specials. The websites for the stores have an user friendly, easy to use website editor where the store can change the data to reflect their current prices and sales and they can change their store banners and graphics. With this type of interface, store owners are able to reflect their website to exactly what is happening in the store.
The two requirements that I have selected from the list is as followed: 1) Develop and implement a new website or enhance an existing website to include customer service. This might include features for self-service or use of real-time customer support. 2) Add Internet-based advertising capabilities such as pop-up ads, banner ads, and pop-overs. Now what we will do is discuss the two topics in more detail. The first topic I picked was Develop and implements a new website or enhances an existing website to include customer service. This might include features for self-service or use of real-time customer support.
With today’s completive and customer driven market, whether you are a local small town shop or a huge e-commerce business, customer satisfaction is your number one priority as a business. Customers rules that market and the key to be successful and to grow in this world today, your business needs to provide the best customer care money can buy and you need to have better customer care then your competition. With e-business, it can be tough to make it customer friendly because of the lack of face to face contact, but to make e-business customer friendly, it will be necessary to upgrade or enhance the current webpage for the company with a dedicated page for customer support. This page needs to be easy to find on any page within the website and it should be easy to read for the customer with numbers and addresses clearly labeled for customer support. There are several features that helps with the organization and layout of the webpage to make things easier for the customer to navigate.
The first feature should be to make sure there are multiple selections for the customer to have to reach the customer service if there are any issues that should arise. The second feature would to include a customer satisfaction form where they can send information about the experience and/or troubles with the products. The third feature is a new feature that is making its way into the e-commerce market and that would be a live chat. With a live chat, customers can get real time customer service and assistance with the issue they are having with customer representatives.
The company should be able to provide these options to the customers with a customer support staff that is experienced and able to resolve the issue for the customer. Just as with the phone support, any support that is requested on the website should be handled and resolved quickly and with accurately. This would be the same for the staff that is online helping to resolve issues, they all should understand the company, policies, products, and services and they should have to keep getting refresher training throughout their time with the company. With web chat, it can be very difficult to get logged on and get help and this can frustrate the customers even more before they even get any help. to keep this from happening, the web chat should use the best web technology so that the customer can log on easily and get into a chat session. The chat window should not take much time to load and there should be little wait time to reach a representative. The customer support staff should be provided with CRM software to make sure that all problems are understood and that all the information they need to solve the customers issue are within hands reach.
The use case for the customer service process
1. Customer calls the toll free number, fills out an online survey, or logs into the online web chat
2. The customer then lets the customer support knows there grievance/issues with the company or product.
3. If this customer is on the phone, the phone representative will have CRM software so that they have the information available to them. If the issue requires the representative to find out additional information, then the representative will place the customer on hold to get the answers to solve the issue and then get back with the customer. If the customer submits an online form, the representative handling the form will get the issue/problem resolved as quickly as possible and email the user with the solution to resolve the issue. If it is a chat session, the representative will help the customer as soon as they let the representative know the issue. They will also use CRM software to help the customer or get help from their fellow co-workers.
4. Once the issue or problem has been resolved, the representative will ask the customer if all issues or questions have been taken care of. If the customer stats that they have had all there issue resolve, the task is complete.
The reason for such an in-depth customer service section and service are because customer service is because customer service is the driving key for any company’s success for its e-business and is vital for the company to continue to enhance its corporate image by providing the best customer service.
The second topic that I picked was to add Internet-based advertising capabilities such as pop-up ads, banner ads, and pop-overs. Another important factor that is missing in internet advertising is search engine optimization; I will include this component within this category. Search engine optimization has become the most important component to internet advertising and without search engine optimization; no business will stand out in the hoard of businesses out there that is using search engine optimization. What search engine optimization does is it helps your website get to the top of a list within search engines. When using internet search engines like Google.com, we type in what we are looking for and a long list of search results that come back. The sites that come first have better search engine optimization technique then the sites towards the bottom, thus making them the first sites that are seen by the customers. To put it plainly, search engine optimization techniques are tools that help your website to become the first choice to appear, in turn increasing the traffic to your website which helps enhance your brand name which will increase your web traffic even more. There are several internet and marketing programs which will help with your search engine optimization but the most popular one today is Google’s Ad words program. When using this service, it will allow your website to be among the first few search results on a search engine such as Google.
Use case for advertising and marketing process.
1. The prospect types their inquiry within a search engine such as Google.com or Bing.com
2. The search engine results appear for the inquiry, which will also display the company’s website link within the first few results as long as the search inquires is related to the company.
3. Once all the results have displayed, the customer then clicks on the company’s web link and reaches the homepage for the company.
4. Once the customer has directed their attention to the company’s website, the task is successfully completed.
