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In a period when everyone is talking about financial meltdown, crisis, layoffs and how to deal with the upcoming bad times, it’s very important not to forget that customers are the “food” for any company.

While many startups don’t have customers yet so they face other types of problems, well extablished businesses can face a significant contraction of their sales because of a general feeling of “fear” by their customers. This feeling is due to different reasons: will your company be alive tomorrow? is your product essential for my life or is it better to save money to pass the winter?

One of the most important (and priority) ways to handle this situation is to create a direct line with your customers in order to make them comfortable while buying from you. This is essential and strategic for the future of any company because customers need to hear you, need to hear your voice and to be reassured they can trust you and keep buying your products and services.

Companies which undervalue this aspect and  keep thinking of making their websites more and more self-service oriented are likely to fail and this is even more true in times like this. Giving the right answer at the right time is crucial for any business, in order to take customers and prospects and guide them straight to the end of the purchase process, preventing them to quit as soon as they face a problem.

All that said, don’t hesitate and act now: engage your customers, make them feel your are there, ready to help them to take decisions faster and to make them happy buyers. Your customers are your life: in difficult times, do everything you can to prevent them from going away.

In conclusion, I’d like to share a quote from Sitofono’s website (disclosure: Sitofono is a service from my company):

e-commerce companies have constantly to deal with this paradox: a growing number of contacts, low conversion rates and an high abandonment rate.

The lack of real time interaction between the customer and the vendor, besides being a cause of dissatisfaction of the potential customer, is, for sure, one of the main reasons of missed opportunities to close a deal in a big number of online transactions.

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Technorati Tags: Business, customer engagement, luca filigheddu, sales, Service

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My company’s customer engagement service Sitofono is now powering the latest and just launched online advertising campaign of the new Lancia Delta, the car which many years ago became very popular because of its numerous wins of rally world championships.

Now the new Lancia Delta has been officially launched and it’s definitely a great successor of the historical older sister, in my dreams when I was a young boy

The campaign is now up and running in Italy only, but if you want to book a test drive, just use Sitofono. Here is the link.

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Technorati Tags: customer engagement, fiat, Lancia Delta, luca filigheddu, sitofono

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According to Gartner, SaaS (Software as a Service) will be a key element for the ecommerce market by 2013.

According to Gartner, at least 90% of eCommerce sites will leverage SaaS (Software as a Service) by 2013.  As Gene Alvarez, research vice president for Gartner, says, “The trend toward SaaS applications has affected customer relationship management (CRM) and other applications, and e-commerce isn’t exempt from this trend.”

Sitofono, my company’s click to engage SaaS, empowers eCommerce by providing a quick and effective way to engage potential customers while they came across your website looking for something to buy.

Gartner is just confirming our view and strategy for Sitofono, but it’s important that this message could quickly reach the people in charge of making ecommerce websites more and more effective. Many marketing and sales directors got it already but many others haven’t got it yet.

Technorati Tags: Business, customer engagement, Customer service, Electronic commerce, Gartner, luca filigheddu, Marketing, sitofono, Software as a service

Today we just released a new website for my company’s customer engagement service Sitofono. Comments are welcome, as usual. In particular, if anyone of my english speaking friends find some typo, error etc., please advise

We needed to make it richer and more suitable to the needs of any company which makes business through the web. Sitofono solves a huge problem and we want companies to really understand what this problem is and, given that sometimes this problem is undervalued, give it the right weight.

If you need more information, please drop me a line or take a look at the new website .

Technorati Tags: Business, click to call, customer engagement, luca filigheddu, sitofono, Voice 2.0

I just wanted to give a brief update about my company’s Sitofono, the customer engagement service we have been offering since the 2nd half of 2006.

I wrote many times in this blog about the need of a “human touch” to the e-commerce world. The need of a human on the line is something many big, medium and even small e-commerce companies are slowly realizing is a fundamental part of their online business. If they plan to targeting a bigger and maybe less specialized customer base than in the past, they MUST pay attention to any tool that can help them to convert more visitors into customers and considering integrating Sitofono into their business.

I’m very happy to see that more and more companies got it. Sitòfono is now a profitable division of my company and in the first four months of 2008 we recorded the following results (compared to the same period of 2007):

Calls from our clients’ websites visitors to our clients: +278 % 

Minutes: +347%

Revenues: +190%

A new Sitòfono website will be online in the following weeks with more options available for any company who wants to invest into a powerful customer engagement suite, where the “click to call” is just a piece of the puzzle.

In addition, a major update of the Sitofono clients’ private area is coming soon. Usage of AJAX and other major updates will offer a whole new experience to our customers. 

We are also releasing a white paper which describes how visitors behave as soon as they get to a website while they are in the process to buy something. This behaviour is not that obvious and any ecommerce company must keep that in mind if they want to convince their visitors (obtained through expensive advertising campaigns) to become real paying customers.

Stay tuned. In addition, we are looking for resellers in UK. If you know companies in the field of online marketing, web design, e-commerce technologies that could be interested, please drop me a line.

Technorati Tags: customer engagement, ecommerce, luca filigheddu, sitofono