Case Study : Usage of Digital Assets for Marketing & Customer Support purposes

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Organization : 

A privately held freight & forwarding organization, based in S.E. Asia & catering to clients in Asia-Pacific directly & through a network of agents & associates.

The issues faced with: 

Growth was stalling owing to:
  1. Inability to secure enough new customers.
  2. Migration of some existing customers to competition, owing to dissatisfaction.
  3. Inability to respond at times to customers, associates & agents need for information & clarification promptly, leading not only to dissatisfaction but also to monetary losses on account of revenue losses, penalties, demurrages etc.,
The need & defined objectives:

  • Cost effective business development channel, particularly for remote customers who weren't quite being reached by agents or associates & couldn't be reached by the local salesforce.
  • Cost effective, & efficient channels & networks to disseminate relevant & important information timely & to respond to queries within reasonably short time periods.
  • Make such networks & channels visible, easily accessible & readable.
The solution:

After ascertaining the issues, problem areas & objectives mentioned above through several discussions with the top management & business & departmental heads, the agreed action plan to address these consisted of:

Addressing most of these issues through the corporate website. Owing to this being sometime back, social media had not quite grown to the extent it has today & the targeted demographics of customers & prospects were felt to be not largely present on social media at the time. Other conventional methods were deemed neither cost-effective nor feasible in certain cases by the management.
Accordingly the following were initiated through the website:
  1. Dynamic pages, updated regularly through a system set up, to reflect current & topical information in sections targeted at prospects, existing customers, agents & associates and also internal staff based operating remotely.
  2. Site carrying Dynamic FAQ Pages, updated regularly, to answer some of the most common queries.
  3. Site carrying select current information sought at times by existing customers, agents & associates & not reflected in FAQ or elsewhere. A system was set up to update such information twice daily, 24X7, and to grant access to select customers & agents through a secured log-in process after a one-time verification.
  4. Specific queries from customers & agents generated e-mail based notifications to designated organization personnel, so that they could view this promptly, at any time & respond at the earliest at any time on any day including after regular work hours & on weekends & public holidays. Earlier, such responses were happening only during normal working hours on regular working days.
  5. Regular site updates & maintenance ensured that the FAQ become progressively more comprehensive, topical & relevant over a period of time. Archived logs of specific queries & responses to those provided a review mechanism to top management & the needed oversight to ensure that queries were indeed being handled promptly & satisfactorily.
  6. Current best practices for Usability, including Readability, Clickability & Accessibility, were used to do the Design, Layout & Content Management of the revamped site, to ensure that prospects, customers & associates would be able to view the content they were interested in without being either confused or annoyed at not being easily able to find what they wanted.
  7. A system to generate cross-links with a number of other relevant & popular websites was set-up. To further enhance visibility of the site & its URL, SEO was carried out to enhance visibility & 'discoverability' of the site. To promote the site & the organization a limited amount of online advertising was done over a period.

The Results:

A review with the top management after a year of implementation of the above processes and after the revamped website went 'live', revealed significant improvements in terms of induction of new customers, satisfaction levels of existing customers, agents & associates as also a drop in the attrition rate of existing customers.








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