How Customer Feedback Can Drive Business Success
Channel Talk
7month 31days
- Customer Cases
Anything Else- How Customer Feedback Can Drive Business Success
Overview
Introduction of Anything Else’s business
How Anything Else gained early traction
How Anything Else achieved 20% conversion through Channel Talk
The results of ongoing communication with customers
Introduction - Anything Else Going Global
The overall starting investments and the risks involved with starting a new venture make opening an online store look much more attractive than an offline one. However, there are challenges that come with moving a business completely online. The lack of contact between businesses and their customers is a major problem. Soo Jung Hong, CEO of Anything Else, an online jewelry e-commerce business, shares some of the challenges she faced when she moved her business from offline to online:
Feedback that was available offline was no longer available.
Lack of insight from customers made it difficult to improve products and services.
Difficulties building real relationships with customers.
Hard to track trends and customer tastes.
In the following interview, we look at how Anything Else overcame some of these challenges and managed to take their small local business, successfully towards global expansion.
Getting Started - The Early Traction and Customer Traffic
Q: Please tell us how you started your business. Where did the idea come from?
A: To be honest, I never intended to start a business in the first place. I worked on small projects for about 3-4 years before this but it wasn’t anything serious. With Anything Else, it started off as a hobby. But as I continued on with this hobby, the people around me kept suggesting that I start a business and sell my products. Despite having doubts, I eventually started the business. I opened up my store and started posting products on Facebook.
Q: Getting early traction from customers in a new market is generally difficult. How did you manage to successfully expand into foreign markets?
B: We had difficulties making sales at the beginning. But after I started becoming more active on Twitter, the sales increased, and once Instagram joined Facebook, the sales increased further. Sometime after, an influencer in Japan introduced our brand to their followers on Twitter and Instagram, and the post went viral, and Anything Else’s sales exploded. It was because of this experience that I decided that I wanted to go global and attempt to enter North America.
Challenges of Collecting Feedback From Customers
Q: What was the biggest challenge of operating Anything Else completely online?
A: I started off with an offline store, where we had a lot of walk-in traffic. We have a healthy supply of feedback from customers. It allowed me to listen to customers and figure out changing trends, preferences and what customers like or dislike about our products. Most of my business decisions were based on this feedback. But after moving online, I wasn't able to receive any, even though I was able to reduce overhead costs. I was left in the dark.
Q: How did you overcome these challenges? What part did Channel Talk play in helping you connect with customers?
A: I remembered Channel Talk from a while back, and knew it could help me connect with customers, so I installed it. The great thing about Channel Talk is the amount of insight that the platform provides about my customers. It makes it easy for me to recognize return customers from first-time visitors, and the user-friendly interface makes it approachable for customers, and easy to use for agents. In terms of my challenges, the biggest challenge was matching the tastes of different customers in different countries. Because each country has its own fashion, culture, and values, what works in one country doesn’t always translate over to others. So the best way to overcome this, in my experience, was to receive direct feedback from the customers. Anything Else has a strong fanbase and our VIP customers always make a point to reach out and provide valuable feedback. I’ve also seen too many stores out there where the quality of the items declines as their business grows. I always keep myself in check by communicating with customers on how they rate our products and services, to avoid this.
“The biggest challenge was matching the tastes of customers.”
Q: Aside from customer feedback, what challenges did you face in terms of sales? How did Channel Talk help you deal with this?
A: A big challenge was convincing hesitating customers to check out after filling their carts. Lots of customers fill their carts only to hesitate. Channel Talk’s automated marketing feature gave these specific customers a little nudge in the right direction and helped them make up their minds about whether to buy or not. Because of this marketing feature Anything Else was able to increase conversion by 20%.
Making Adjustments and Applying Feedback for Business Growth
Q: How did the increase in feedback from customers help your business expansion and keep Anything Else competitive in the different markets?
A: In Japan, I found out that certain words that were used in Korea or North America weren’t used the same way there. I was able to find out through customers, that I was using the wrong word to describe an earring or piercing. If I didn’t receive this feedback I would have continued to use the wrong word and could have confused some of the visitors to the site. Also, I was able to figure out what was in trend in Japan. This gave me insight into what designs I needed to prepare for Japan specifically.
For North America, I found out from customers that there was a lack of variety in the market compared to Asia. So Anything Else was able to stay competitive by providing more variety that is unique and uncommon in the North American market.
Q: What were the results of applying feedback from customers?
A: As I already mentioned, many of the changes I made helped me stay competitive. I was able to gain over 90,000 followers on Anything Else’s social media accounts, and increase overall sales conversions by 20%. The changes I made to my business greatly helped improve customer experience and helped me decide on what products to sell, unique to each country. But most important of all, my customers are very happy with both the products and the service.
“Over 90,000 followers and 20% conversion.”
Conclusion - Channel Talk & Anything Else
Q: What is Channel Talk to you as a business owner?
A: To me, Channel Talk is like a door that allows me to reconnect with my customers online. It’s a door that customers can knock on at any moment when they want to talk and provide their opinions to the business. It might not be the best fit for new businesses just starting out, but if you already have a customer base, I definitely recommend it. There’s lots of platforms out there that claim to do half of what Channel Talk does, but you’ll know after using it, that most of their features don’t come close or cost more than they claim.”
Check out Anything Else homepage.
“Channel Talk is like a door that allowed me to reconnect with customers.”
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