Ger Van Den Buijs

Forget Reach, Start Selling Ger Van Den Buijs

E-commerce has conquered a lot of market share. Making profits, however, turns out to be hard for most companies. If price competition and high marketing costs squeeze your profits too, this book is for you. In our Onlife era, in which online and offline experiences confluence, consumers are overloaded with information. The key to success is found in customer centricity, customer flow, and individual attention. This creates a new potential for companies with a strong history in retail to win online as well.

FORGET REACH, START SELLING starts by explaining why most companies find it so hard to make e-commerce sufficiently profitable. Ger van den Buijs uses well known retail sales strategies to explain what the strengths and weaknesses of e-commerce are. Due to the lack of differentiation, price is the only marketing instrument e-commerce currently has.

The focus in e-commerce is to grow sales by expanding reach. This strategy backfires, because the total sum of digital marketing is overloading the customer. The cost of marketing is rising, while its effectivity is decreasing. As a consequence of the information overload, attention is a customer's most scarce resource. This requires new strategies. Ger van den Buijs hands you three new strategies. The direction of these strategies is first demonstrated in three showcase interviews with salespeople that managed to be successful in a time of hefty competition.

The first strategy is 'Vocification', meaning: "activating the voice of the customer inside your shop". There is proof that the information capabilities have three times more impact on the success of a site than the transactional capabilities. Onlife customers, however, want that information to be communicated in a personal, transparent, immediate, open and connected experience. Such an open interaction requires that customer care teams become craftsmen, like chefs in an open kitchen restaurant. Their number one task is to make sure that customers are happy. They will be standing amidst customers, helping them to achieve flow in their purchasing process.

The 'In Action Interaction' strategy explains how to realize this customer flow. The strategy has three steps: activate, listen and resolve. The online purchasing process is analyzed step by step and improvement opportunities are being identified. Cross-customer interaction plays an important role, because today's customers trust online peers more than companies and institutions.

The third strategy is called 'Augmented Interaction'. The concept of 'Augmented Interaction' means that computer power supports human interaction, instead of replacing it. Ger van den Buijs first explains the value of questions and stories from a customer perspective. Questions trigger activity. Stories can build value. In order to create long-term engagement, a company has to communicate its soul. With a number of examples, it is shown how this can be done successfully. Once you understand the values of interaction, you can evaluate automated interaction. Augmented interaction is positioned as an alternative to chat bots, because research shows that, in many situations, people still value human interaction.

In the last chapter Ger van den Buijs discusses the system requirements to realize the above concepts most effectively. The features of the prototype platform FiveDolphins are shared openly.