How important is the online channel to the success of your brand?  EXTREMELY!  A new survey finds that 41% of shoppers are less likely to shop offline after having a bad online experience.

According to Internet Retailer, "An increasing number of online consumers say that a bad online shopping experience at a multi-channel merchant makes it less likely that they'll shop at the same retailer's stores."  The survey, conducted by Allurent, also found that 59% of respondents will have a more negative view of a brand after a frustrating online experience.  Additionally, 82% of consumers surveyed said they were less likely to return to a website that offered a poor experience.

This provides a rather compelling argument for enhancing your site with a number of features that improve the customer experience, including technology to increase personalization, improve support and deliver seamless integration across channels. 

A story published in the most recent edition of Speech Technology Magazine looks at a variety of ways that companies are integrating voice solutions into their outbound marketing campaigns.  One way is through making voice a component of a larger multimedia campaign like we've discussed in the past.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Another early example of this kind of multimodal marketing was on display last year in a campaign by European carmaker Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors. Opel, looking to herald the launch of a new convertible, emailed 80,000 addresses in its database, asking recipients to supply their phone numbers. In exchange, Opel promised to enter them into a sweepstakes, and not to share the phone numbers with anyone. 

Interest was surprisingly high: 16,000 people sent in their phone numbers, and were greeted with a second email providing a link to a Web site. Once there, consumers viewed a comedic three-minute movie, personalized with their names in one scene. Moments later, when a character in the film is seen dialing a phone, the consumer’s own phone rang, with a 30- second message from the character inviting the consumer to test drive the new car. The innovative combination of media snowballed into a viral mania, with recipients providing email addresses and phone numbers for their friends so they, too, could get “called” by the Web movie.

In just a few weeks, the campaign generated 450,000 calls. This, says Elisabeth Jane Bertrand, a Belgian interactive marketing consultant who worked on the project for eStara, a division of e-commerce solutions provider ATG, “is a typical example of how cross-media integration works. This was a bilateral approach, using two media channels.” Because of the personalized component, she says, “you see a much higher level of consumer engagement with the brand.”

Shop.org's First Look 2007 event kicksoff starting Wednesday this week in Orlando.  First Look 2007 is future-focused, bringing together Internet and multichannel retailers and service-providers for a look into the key issues you will face in the coming years and the innovations that will help grow your business.

For those of you attending and interested in learning more about enhancing online sales and support with click to call and chat, be sure to stop by ATG's booth (#600) to speak with an eStara representative. 

Not attending? Don't worry, you can still get a look at click to call and learn how to dramatically increase sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment by checking out our demo. 

John Gaffney over at 1to1 Media helps connect the dots between customer experience and the bottom line.  It's quite simple in his mind (and ours)...the most successful companies are those that offer the best, most unique, customer experience.  These are companies where, as Gaffney explains, "The customer experience is the brand promise and the value proposition."

No real surprise here, but a new J.D. Power survey confirms what many of us already suspected...customer service issues handled by a computer automated response system (ARS or IVR) on the telephone generate significantly lower customer care ratings than those handled by a live agent.

According to the report, "[C]ustomers who speak with a live agent on the telephone provide an average index score of 127 points, which is significantly higher than the industry average of 98 points. However, customers contacting their carrier through an ARS system rate their experiences significantly lower, averaging 92 index points."