A column by Prime Source CEO Evgeny Scherbinin
Very soon the average person will be spending half of their time on the internet; today it is more than 40%. These are the figures cited by We Are Social and Hootsuite in their annual Digital 2020 report. They are global figures, and the numbers differ from country to country.
According to the researchers, the average user spends 6 hours and 43 minutes online every day, or more than 100 days a year.
Taken together, the global internet audience will spend 1.25 billion years online in 2020 alone. Subtract the time spent sleeping and it turns out that the average person spends almost 40% of their time on the internet. All that remains for business is to present its product to the buyer online in the right way.
In the non-digital world, to sell a product an organization has to rent a spot at the market and place advertising, after which customers may or may not come. In the digital world this process works differently.
First. There are several tools for attracting customers online.
Marketplaces. These are digital platforms, “shop windows” where sellers can list their goods. Kazakhstan has several such resources: kaspi.kz, Chocomart, ForteMarket and others. The flow of customers is generated by the platform’s own advertising and by promoting the product in search. While the fashion for marketplaces is only just taking shape in Kazakhstan, in neighboring Russia, according to the analytical agency Data Insight, marketplaces may account for up to 70% of online sales by the end of the year.
Social media marketing (SMM). This means promoting the seller’s website online — in search queries and on social networks. For a long time it was believed that promotion required special expertise and so-called SMM managers.
Today there are intuitive aggregator tools that let you configure the promotion of a website across all platforms using simple filters.
Notification. This covers SMS and push messages, advertising on social networks and calls from an advertising robot based on geotargeting. The seller can select an area on the map, as well as the age, gender and other parameters of the customer, on the basis of which a message will be sent to them (triggered by a configured event). For example, a beauty salon can automatically send a monthly message with a discount voucher for a visit to women aged 20 to 55 who live within a one-kilometer radius.
Second. The stage of advising customers and completing an online request on the website is no less important than finding the buyer. Previously, to take an order for a product or service the seller had either to maintain a physical office or to set up a call center, purchase and configure equipment and software, and hire and train staff. Today this stage can be handled entirely with online tools.
Contact center outsourcing. An entrepreneur can hire professional agents who will advise customers and take orders for their goods and services. Examples of such outsourced contact centers are KT Cloud, Transtelecom, Sanatel and others. These contact centers can serve customers over video, voice or text channels (messengers, social networks, website chat).
Renting contact center software (video, voice, text). An entrepreneur can provide their agents with workstations within an already built and operating contact center infrastructure. This saves time and money and guarantees mobility.
Voice and text robots are the newest and at the same time the least expensive way of serving customers. A system with artificial intelligence can answer a customer’s questions and even carry out a particular transaction.
Third. The stage of paying for the product or service on the marketplace is no less important. To accept payment, a company previously had to have a cash register and a bank card payment terminal. Today payments in an online store or marketplace are accepted by setting up internet acquiring. In Kazakhstan such services are offered by processing.kz, for example.
To accept payment at physical points of sale, two- and three-component devices are used that in a single action take the payment, record the item’s disposal in the accounts and fiscalize the transaction. ForteKassa, for example, offers such a service.
Fourth. Delivery of goods or exchange of documents. Postal and courier services have existed for a long time, but using them to deliver goods was not a process so much as a project, requiring the terms and details to be agreed each time. This made it impossible to embed third-party logistics companies into organizations’ automated business processes. Today alternative options are on offer in this area.
Delivery outsourcing. There are companies that can deliver any product or carry out a specific task, such as delivering cards together with document signing and customer identification. Delivery requests are sent in digital form, either directly from the client’s system or through the delivery service’s own system. Mykhat is an example of such a service.
A service for running your own courier operation. For entrepreneurs who consider using their own couriers the better option, there are services that provide the full infrastructure needed to organize that operation efficiently. These include courier apps, dispatcher software and artificial intelligence that automatically accepts requests and builds smart logistics.
Fifth. Employee workplaces. Many entrepreneurs have already concluded that buying their own office is usually not economically justified, since the deposit interest on the purchase amount is as a rule higher than the cost of renting premises.
The quarantine has popularized tools for organizing and monitoring remote work that already existed: video calling services, task tracking and management, and monitoring an employee’s work at a remote workstation. Office space can therefore be reduced substantially, up to and including giving up physical offices altogether.
By making full use of the possibilities of modern technology, an organization can raise customer satisfaction, cut operating costs and grow revenue even in a crisis. This creates almost perpetual demand — satisfied customers come back to buy again, bringing new customers with them.
Source : https://kursiv.kz/news/rynki/2020-07/kak-virtualnye-organizacii-formiruyut-pochti-beskonechnyy-spros