Factfile 27
An e-channel strategy addresses sales, service and marketing activities in a unified, online, customer experience in order to:
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Make it easy for customers to do business with you.
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Focus on the end customer for your products and services.
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Redesign you customer-facing business process from the end customer?s point of view.
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Wire your company for profit: design a comprehensive evolving electronic business architecture.
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Foster customer loyalty, the key to profitability in electronic commerce.
Often the overall business challenge is to migrate existing customers to transact through e-channel and obtain higher value per customer from a lower cost base.
To achieve this, it is important that a migration plan is developed that will support sales staff and employees and will provide customers with the right information at the right time. Migration cannot be a one-hit piece of activity but must pervade throughout the relevant communications with customers.
BT depicts this in the following diagram.
Figure 11: Example of a migration plan
Source: M2B Canon, 2002.
The building industry and in particular the bathroom products market is characterised by multiple sales channels and numerous clients, choosers and influencers.