Steve Jobs used to say that “a lot of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.
The same is true for problems: people don’t know they have one until you show it to them.
Let me talk to you about the big problem in eCommerce – Customer Support.
Give me a few minutes and I’ll explain why you’re doing Customer Support wrong – and how you can get it right. First, let’s look at airplanes.
How One Small Airline Disrupted an Industry
Take the airline industry in the 1960s. It was a time when the lives of pilots and air stewards were perceived as glamorous; flying all over the world, visiting exotic locations via expensive planes.
And therein lay the problem – expense.
Air travel was so expensive that it was only considered a viable option for the elite classes. That was until Southwest Airlines showed the commercial airline industry the magnitude of this problem and seized a giant opportunity in the process.
Southwest Airlines is the world’s second largest airline, but it wasn’t always that way. Having studied former intra-state airline PSA’s model in 1967, Southwest’s founder Herb Kelleher built the low-cost model that has become today’s global industry standard.
His philosophy? If you get your passengers to their destinations when they want to get there, on time, at the lowest possible fares, people will fly with your airline.
No frills also meant no premium experience. Out with the first class section, freebies, legroom and free cabin baggage. Once Southwest demonstrated that people were willing to sacrifice comfort in favour of low cost, the industry and the world changed forever.
Ryanair is a prime example of Southwest’s legacy – achieving huge success by adopting the low-cost business model. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has regularly referred to his company as ‘the Southwest Airlines of Europe”, offering minimal comforts for low cost and high efficiency.
The Irish airline may have also picked up its penchant for PR stunts from Southwest too. Kelleher once resolved a legal dispute around the ‘Just Plane Smart’ slogan with an arm wrestle. He lost.
Southwest Airlines made an expensive and exclusive form of travel accessible by dramatically reducing ticket costs, taking a simple idea and executing it brilliantly.
Changing the Status Quo
Sometimes industries don’t believe they have a problem even if you do show them. In 1996, two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a PhD search engine project called ‘Backrub’, that they presented to the major search engines like Yahoo, Lycos and a few others.
None of those companies made a major offer, so Page and Brin went back to their garage and invented Google, one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Yahoo, on the other hand, is for sale as of February 2016.
An industry disruptor we all know well, Amazon, continues to drive change in every activity it touches – video and audio streaming, logistics, delivery drones, groceries – you name it.
Solving the Customer Support problem
In online selling, time is everything – delivering on time, solving customer queries on time, maximizing efficiency to save time.
Because time management is so essential to sellers, why would sellers spend so much time managing customer support on each channel separately?
It doesn’t make sense to have to log in to your Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, website and more just to respond to customers with problems. How can you keep on top of all this and derive meaningful metrics from data that’s literally all over the place?
This is the Customer Support problem that we solve.
xSellco Fusion takes away the pain of multichannel customer support by putting all your queries and data into one centralized dashboard.
Stop seeing your Customer Support in terms of disorganized queries broken up into several channels. Start seeing it as one key scalable function in your business.
Don’t wait for others to lead the way. Be bold and make the change.
Start a free 14-day Trial of xSellco Fusion