The key to connecting with your customers

Based on research conducted at IESE as academic director of the industry meeting on e-commerce, we tried to understand what companies do to connect well with their customers. Together with my friend and colleague, Professor Capizzani, we discovered two innovative methods that were being carried out by companies that are leaders in sales.

One of the keys was, First, build relationships and then, thanks to that, close transactions. I’m going to focus on one of them: the hyperservice and I’m going to illustrate it with an example.

You may have heard this before: you get up to go to work. You have a hard day ahead of you: meetings, reports, emails. You’re going to be exhausted, and as you drive or take the subway to work, you dream about that coffee from the coffee shop on the corner of your office that you love so much and that will give you an extra boost of energy.

The problem is that there is often a long queue and you are short on time. The solution: there is a company that has expanded its service in an original way. Now it allows you to order and pay for coffee using your cell phone.

Yes. Now you can configure your coffee just the way you like it: double, iced, with milk, with soy, with caramel… So, when you arrive at the coffee shop, you skip the line and right away you have your cup served, prepared on the spot without having to wait. Wonderful, right?

We are talking about a chain with thousands of branches, that is, They managed to order millions of coffees by mobile phone,And the numbers keep growing month after month, so much so that they had to modify their organization to be able to absorb the increase in users who order their café latte (a traditional coffee with milk) this way.

This model, together with Prof. Capizzani, was named hyperservice,and essentially consists of extend and improve things you already did. Normally, since you don’t create anything new you don’t charge for it. You do the same thing, but in an augmented way and that allows you build better relationships with your customers and Consequently get more sales.