Mapping out an effective online customer retention strategy

More and more customer interactions are taking place online, thanks to a combination of factors that make the Web an attractive place for doing business: speed of access and response; multiple and widely available points of interaction; and ability to make changes quickly.

However, these factors can also quickly turn against an e-commerce company.

When customers have either a good or bad experience, they want to share the details with others. Before the Web, word-of-mouth was the primary mode of communication, and there were various reports about how frequently customer experience information was shared with others, including statements like, "A happy customer tells seven others, but an unhappy customer tells forty."

In today's online world, good and bad experiences are shared on blogs, on Web sites designed specifically to collect and report experience information, through email messages that can become viral, on social networking sites, and in a wide variety of other fast-moving, widely distributed forms. The reach is well beyond seven or 40, connections are immediate, and the information about these experiences remains online pretty much forever.

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