Customer Commerce solves the pain of running a small business online

In the past few years, we’ve been talking to customers about the issue of time. We’ve become acutely aware of the time that is being wasted on traditional e-commerce solutions.

Small to medium businesses are wasting enormous amounts of their team’s time by using a multitude of systems to cobble together an overall system to try to run their e-commerce business effectively.

Their time is being wasted making multiple systems talk to each other. It is also being wasted in trying to find the correct, up-to-date information on customers in multiple data silos. Patchwork web and cart plug-ins only add further complexity and stress.

Wasting staff time is costly, and it impacts the business’s bottom line.

However, when businesses start wasting customers’ time, they then move into a whole new universe of pain.

Customers who feel their time is being wasted by companies who don’t understand their needs, who can’t find their information or put them on hold to “check another system” will go elsewhere to satisfy their needs and wants.

If a company churns through customers, its acquisition costs rise, its lifetime customer loyalty statistics fall, and it ends up in a world of pain when it comes to trying to scale the business. Business owners know that multiple systems also introduce multiple places where something can go wrong.

Research around the globe shows that the current e-commerce model is not working, with climbing rates of cart abandonment and product returns at all-time highs.

Customer Commerce is the solution to these woes. Customer Commerce can offer a scalable, affordable solution and move the business to a single system, where any staff member can find data on any customer and know it is up to date and correct. There will be no need to pay staff to get disparate systems to talk to each other.

Best of all, customers will love the fact that the company knows them, understands their needs and wants, and can answer any query they have quickly and correctly. In short, their experience will be far superior to the current “e-commerce” way of doing business.

The Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report shows us that providing this outcome for customers is going to be beneficial for SMBs:

• 80% of customers say good customer service makes them more likely to purchase again.

• Nearly half of customers — including three-fifths of millennials — are willing to pay extra for better customer service.

Happy customers become loyal customers, shooting a company’s lifetime customer value, NPS scores and retention rates through the roof.

Spending less on humans trying to make computer systems talk to each other will drive down staff costs and have staff on meaningful tasks that grow the business.

Beyond the basics, Customer Commerce solutions also offer the ability to launch multiple stores, for multiple brands across multiple time zones and languages. It allows real-time stock management and integration with POS systems. This facilitates a company now able to reach further into global markets both online and with bricks-and-mortar, without adding any complexity to the Customer Commerce system that will be powering its business to the next level.

Prioritizing the customer and treating customers’ time like your own by moving to a Customer Commerce solution, is the way forward for small to medium businesses.