How good it a a visit to your website?

Customer Relationship Management - CRM

Customer relationship management builds customer loyalty through better customized support. Examples include: enhanced registration, live operator interfaces, chat functions, and personalized websites. Further customization involves the use of story boards and scripts that lead the prospect/customer/user or member through a rules engine and decision tree. The end result gets you closer to the customer and closer to the sale. The premise is that we can increase the conversion rate of prospects to buyers through strategic use of customized interfaces and an automated buying cycle. This is how Web 2.0 can truly benefit your company.

Another CRM solution involves follow-up to prospects via HTML e-mail. Floorplans, walkthroughs, exteriors and brochures can be delivered as follow ups to the first website visit. Suggestions are made regarding alternative plans, floorplans, or communities. If the buyer refers the e-mail to someone else in the buying cycle, that person is added to a database for future follow up. These processes also apply to members of Platinum City Clubs and Sports Clubs.

Finance options must be tailored to the audience.

Call Center

A call center allows an appointment to be made from at the point of highest interest. A one on one conversation at a the time when your user, customer, or member wants it most. Companies who employ this process have the advantage of creating that first appointment easily with little effort on the part of the buyer. After the appointment the customer is dynamically directed to your sales or membership office. Maps are enabled for mobile devices.

Forester Research indicates that "Sixty percent of those website visitors who start an order form never complete it". Having a call center on the website can help you close sales.

A call center help to increases buying, answers questions about products or services, reduces concern about credit card use, gives customers "the personal touch", helps customers navigate web sites easily, directs customer calls to specific people or departments, and provides access to customers worldwide.

Streaming Media

Videos and presentations you use in your sales office or Kiosk can be streamed inexpensively on the Web. Because this information is story boarded and scripted it can show your products and services exactly as you want then to be percieved.

Videos can convey the more than static pictures and text. A feeling of the surroundings, iamenities, and lifestyle. Video streaming provides a rich, controlled, and scripted experience for the web visitor.

A streaming video needs to adjust to the ways that your visitors view the site. The bandwidth must adjust to connection speeds. The higher the bandwidth the better the video and audio quality.

Virtual Tours

Virtual Tours are meant to immerse the web visitor and resemble a tour. The visitor may zoom in or out and rotate 360 degrees. The tour can be seamed from room to room and connected from other images dynamically. A static alternative should be provided for those on low bandwidth connections.

Walkthrough Enhancements

Once interested, the visitor should be invited to register and receive an incentive to visit the sales office or meet with member relations. Follow up occurs automatically, is customized, and tracked. Custom mailers are sent for the community of choice, reminding the visitor to return to the website or make an appointment at the sales office. An email marketing piece can be created that is interactive and includes a virtual tour, options, and places a call to the sales office or member relations for appointments. If sent to a friend, the mailer becomes part of a viral marketing program.

The sales office experience online closely resembles and entices leadint to additional sales.

Coupon incentives can be offered as an incentive for the first appointment. On presentation, this coupon links the virtual and real world.

Appointments from the Call Center are tracked and the acquisition cost per sale can be compared with that of other media.

Rendered Models

Rendering technology allows  modeling properies that may not yet exist.  The visitor can customize options, appliances, and truly visualize themselves in the experience. A configurator provides the capability to customize and save colors, materials, fixtures, textures, and views to share with others. The buyer can spend as much time as is required to optimize their choices.

Databases

Databases serve many purposes for the website owner.

In the example to the right, new prospective buyers enter their data into a priority list for upcoming or existing communities. Buyers are invited to the sales center for either purchase or aution at each phase of the build process and included in dinners, special events, or special offers. Tracking occurs via coupons.

The databases thus generated repond to the users needs and prefrences and registered requests in HTML and text formats.

Database Enhancements:

Database can provide support to sales and community building processes. Offers bring new visitors to the sales office, a cyclic process is defined that tracks and scripts the steps necessary for a prospective buyer to become an actual buyer. A customized greeting welcomes the return buyer, remembers their previous choices, and customizes the information chosen. Rules or heuristic based predictive behavior can suggest alternative choices be they for communities, plans, elevations, or higlights that may help sell. Customization can be based on previous selections, preferences, and choices.

After the sale customer surveys can suggest options and styles designed to match the preferences of the customer. Past sales information can then be used as a predictive device for what options are most popular and increasing the desirability. An Intranet and Extranet can help standardize vendors and suppliers and stabilize and standardize costs.

Dynamic Mapping

Dynamic mapping allows the visitor to see a local map and receive customized directions from a mapping service. Since one of the objectives identified early on is usually to get the visitor to the sales office, mapping is done with both a fixed local map and a dynamic one for each sales office or loacation. Directions and Maps can be read on-line, or printed.

Mapping Enhancements:
Maps and directions can be downloaded or displayed on demand to mobile devices.

Mobile Device Access

The beginning of 2009 saw more than 3 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. Forecasters predict up to 70% of these devices will have Internet access.

Most of these users are bound to be upscale. To position for an advantage with this lucrative demographic. Despite our current economic situation the growth rate in users of these devices is prodicted to be a year on year 3.1% by 2010.

Vendors, Suppliers, and Business Partners
It used to be about conducting basic transactions with customers online, now it's about the way suppliers, partners and customers transact. An in-depth process needs to be followed to learn where the e-business opportunities exist for you. You may benefit from support for financing, RFPs, quotes, Purchase Orders, and service acquisitions. An Intranet or Extranet may need to be a part of your business implementation.