Huge opportunities to capture Customer demographic and behavioral facts, are offered on the web channel. This facts gathered on the home business web web page, can be applied to enhance Customer service.
The use of e-services is characterized by a lower degree of anonymity compared to conventional money transactions, given that it requires the submission of a minimum set of payment information (name, credit card number, shipment address for a physical product). Moreover, a User is sometimes invited to register to a web site and fill-in data related to his private profile, professional activity and interests. The User gets in return, access to the site's content, or an email with a white paper, or some other internet product or service.
Personalized treatment of each registered User is feasible, given that the User has submitted her/his preferences (e.g. a news web-site could present in a personalized page, news relating to the predetermined areas of interest only). On the other hand, the behavior of a web User can be captured in detail, in a sequence of clicks on the hyperlinks, that the User follows as he navigates via the a variety of web pages (a sequence known as clickstream). Clickstream analysis is a new trend, in order to develop Customer insight on the web channel. Customer insight can lead to a even more successful advertising promotion on the internet. Item promotion based on analyzed Customer profiles, can be very helpful. An example of this is the personalized promotion of books on Amazon.com, based on prior Customer purchases or selections in a wish list.
The development of portals which focus on a certain vertical marketplace (known as vortals), aims at targeting specific customer groups, and allows the focused promotion of products and services from this vertical industry, when this particular Customer group is attracted. Lots of such examples can be identified on the world-wide-web, like traveling and vacation sites, or wholesome living and nutrition sites. Moreover, product search on the online, via the submission of keywords or keyphrases on search engines, allows the extremely focused promotion of merchandise and services on the search result pages. This technique, recognized as keyword advertising, has a highly high possible to generate business value and is growing extremely quickly.
The automated customer-home business interaction possible of the internet, adjustments radically the transaction landscape, and creates new opportunities for value creation, but also new risks for companies oriented exclusively to conventional transactions.
Copyright 2006 - Kostis Panayotakis
