The Customer Experience Begins Well Before the Transaction

The Fleet Customer Experience Revolution

By Jeofrey Bean

A customer’s experience with your company usually begins well before there is a transaction. Leverage this as you prepare the customer experience that is directly with your company. And influence the influencers of your customers such as reviewers, social media readers, writers, and advocates. By doing this purposely you use to your advantage the increasing amount of time potential customers are putting into accessing decision making information before there is a transaction.

You’ll have a big advantage over the majority of companies waiting for a transaction before engaging customers.

“Consumers are changing the way they choose their cars,” says Chrissy Totty, head of innovation at BMW’s media planning agency Vizeum. “We researched the consumer decision-making process and it is very different from even five years ago. It has become more complex and a lot shorter.”

The car buying customer experience begins with an event that puts a person in car buying mode such as the old car finally costing too much to repair or a growing family.

Now in the market for a new car, instead of going into traditional shopping mode and going from one dealer to another, collecting brochures and listening to sales pitches, 70% of all people in the market for a car spend their time online gathering information about models, options and prices. They read web sites, professional and amateur auto reviews and tap their social networks to learn about a car or get the back story on a particular dealership. By the time they show up at the dealer, they are informed and may already have decided on the exact specifications of their purchase.

The same changes are taking place in business to business markets. The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) surveyed more than 1,400 B2B customers across multiple industries, and found that 57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer talks to a supplier.

Your company may provide a great transaction experience – but if you ignore the pre-transaction experience, you may be missing out on a large percentage of potential customers.

Be here next month in Fleet Management Weekly when the discussion highlights some of the best practices common to experience maker companies regardless of size or industry!

Reference Links
http://www.delmarresearch.com/