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If you seek to differentiate your service and extend customer relationships by delivering a great customer experience, it is critical you adopt a customer-first mentality during the sales process. This is a crucial lesson broadband providers are learning each day. The key to success begins with creating a halo effect with your customers through a flawless online sign-up process.

Why CX Matters

The value of a great CX becomes even more important at a time when businesses everywhere (including broadband) need to operate more cost-effectively. Even though the Broadband Equity Access and Development Program has opened up the playing field for massive expansion and customer acquisition opportunities, operators are also being stricken by economic challenges. Against this backdrop, they’re increasingly looking for a better CX for many reasons including the reality that businesses with an outstanding CX generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that fall behind.

CX Needs to Kick in During Sales

Where does CX begin, though? Too many businesses focus on CX after a consumer becomes a customer. This is a lost opportunity. CX should kick in during sales. And in the broadband industry, that sales process happens online when a consumer is shopping for service. Think about the last time you booked a hotel or flight or bought something online. Did you encounter roadblocks, like confusing pricing or a difficult navigation through the shopping cart? If so, how did that purchase process affect your perception of the company you’re working with – assuming you even went through with the transaction after you experienced needless friction?

The same holds true for the broadband industry. Operators need to manage some crucial details during acquisition in order to create a positive halo effect that carries through to customer management. 

Some Ways to Create a Halo Effect

Here are some specific features that operators can offer on their websites to create a halo when someone is on your site:

• Simple and clear offers. Display your plans in a simple and clear manner, which is essential to avoid overwhelming visitors. Broadband providers should ensure your offerings are easy to understand, with clear pricing and features.

• Check Availability features. Does your site have an accurate “Check Availability,” feature, which allows visitors to quickly check if the service is (or will be) available in their area? This is crucial for saving the user’s time and setting correct expectations.

• No hidden fees or surprises. Transparency regarding pricing and terms is crucial for a good customer experience – especially during the shopping cart experience, where a consumer is about to click “buy.” Springing a surprise on a potential customer can either kill the sale or create a negative vibe if the consumer goes through with the transaction.

• Accessible customer support. Having easily accessible customer support can significantly improve the customer experience. Providing a visible “Contact Us” link, FAQs, or a live chat feature can be very helpful.

• Easy sign-up. Streamline the sign-up process to make it as easy as possible for visitors to become customers. This includes minimizing the number of steps, having clear instructions, allow them to effortlessly move forward and backward within the shopping flow and providing reassurances regarding privacy and security.

This all sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But too many providers are not doing any of the above. 

Why Operators Are Falling Down with CX during Sales

Why are operators not providing some of these essential tools on their sign-up sites? Because they are hampered by a mentality of “All we need to do is take orders from our website” to sign up customers. They’re relying on a legacy approach of simply connecting a website to back-office systems to take orders and not caring for key capabilities needed to enable high performance.

But attempting to rely upon homegrown solutions or leveraging order-taking functionality as part of one of the many features from other back-office systems is, more often than not, a recipe for poor sales performance.

This is because they were not designed to be highly adaptable with the full breadth of supporting features to drive performance with the customer sales experience as the top priority. As a result, the operator experiences difficulties with change management and data transparency, not to mention the solutions are expensive and take time to build and manage to drive performance.

A Solution

The better strategy is to use a digital commerce solution purpose-built for the broadband industry like Atlas CORE. Our solution offers an out-of-the-box implementation that includes optimized sales experiences delivered by our rules-based CORE CX^TMDynamic Experience Engine a highly adaptable platform, robust full-funnel analytics, and deployment in only a few weeks. 

Atlas CORE can orchestrate sales experiences down to the address based upon marketing campaign, competitive footprint, underlying technology, or really any parameter outlined by the operator.  Delivering the right experience and the right message at the right time ensures less friction throughout the sales flow. This is crucial because friction is typically the culprit when an eCommerce site fails to convert. 

Isn’t it time for you to deliver better sales experiences and capture more sales opportunities with an innovative solution that can adapt to what is needed today and in the future?  Contact us today to learn more.