Every business has to interact with its customers. While interaction is fairly simple offline because your employees can just talk to customers, it’s a little more complicated through the Internet. You need to create interactive elements and use persuasive strategies to get customers to buy from you. If you aren’t investing in a customer interaction plan, then you aren’t getting the most from each customer.

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Increase Sales 
The best reason to invest in  a customer interaction plan is because it boosts sales. People like interaction. There are many books and reports showing that many customers make their buying decisions based on how much interaction a company has with them.

There are now many advanced methods that designers and programmers can use to make your website interactive. This can be as simple as chatting with a representative or having an interactive catalog that changes based on the user’s choices.

Interacting with your customer can boost sales by 20 percent or more if you have a good plan. Failing to have an interaction plan can also lead to lower sales since many other businesses are offering these features on their websites.

Interaction is Expected 

Businesses that don’t cater to a customer’s expectations will lose sales. Interaction is becoming a key element in gaining sales online. This has caused some people to expect a certain level of interactivity. While this isn’t quite as expected as having a good shopping cart program and offering various payment methods, interactivity will become more essential as more businesses offer it.

Failing to capitalize on this now will make your business seem outdated when all of your competitors are catering to this expectation. Businesses have to keep up with each other, and most of your competitors are investing in a customer interaction plan to boost sales.

Use Customers 

A large part of customer interaction is taking your hand out of the content creation process and relying on your customers to work for you. If you look at many of the top ecommerce stores, then you will see that most of their content comes from users. The ecommerce store supplies product descriptions and perhaps a critical review, but customers generate most of the content.

This is done through reviews and comments. Customers will say which products are good and they will leave comments so that other customers can read about their experiences. This has proven very successful because modern online shoppers will search for reviews of a product before buying it. If you supply these reviews and let customers interact with them, then this ensures that they will stay on your website will making buying decisions.

Open to Customers 

If you have a simple HTML ecommerce website without a blog or any interactive elements, then customers might wonder if you are still selling products. Many static websites are losing customers simply because they seem closed.

Customers are expecting ecommerce websites to occasionally change. You don’t need to completely change your design, but failing to add anything will decrease your number of customers. This would be the equivalent of a store never turning its lights on or changing its signage.

Many websites that don’t have a customer interaction plan are failing to update their content. If you want more customers, then show that you are open by making posts and adding interactive elements.

Necessary Repetition 

A large part of customer interaction is repeating a product’s name and benefits. This is commonly done through email newsletters, social media and on the website itself. The reason for this is because customers often don’t buy a product without hearing about it a few times. Hearing about it more than once makes the product seem more important.

Having a good and consistent customer interaction plan will help you schedule this repetition so that it gets customers excited about buying. It will also avoid unnecessary repetition that could irritate customers.

Conclusion 

Failing to have a customer interaction plan is inexcusable in the modern ecommerce world. If you want to boost sales and continue doing business online, then you need a good plan that will use your website to its fullest extent. This will cost money for research and planning, but you should make much more money in return.

Author Bio: Callie Cohane works with Nice Systems to ensure that customer interaction management is always running smoothly!