Manufacturers would do well to take notes from Amazon's tactics to create transactional ease for customers this year…
Danny:
Hey, what's up? Danny Gonzales here with IndustrialSage. Hey, listen. Today we're going to talk about a little bit more around transactional ease and that customer experience and being customer-obsessed.
So if you have been following IndustrialSage recently, we've launched with the Bright Ideas Series. It's by Acuity Brands®, so Bright Ideas by Acuity Brands on IndustrialSage is very exciting. A lot of great topics that are coming out on a weekly basis. This was launched back in August, and so it's been fantastic. So one of the episodes that was released, maybe a couple weeks ago was around transactional ease. So we had Acuity's, some of their website team on. Another one, we had– I think the episode was called "Transactional Ease" with their CTO and other people. And they were talking about just really the importance of having website– not just website design, but just the overall sense of making it very easy for your customer to work with you, to be able to buy from you. And that's such a big, big thing, especially now, with Covid times right now, it's been, obviously, very challenging.
But this is really something that, ultimately, is something that really was super important before. There was a lot of conversation around being customer-obsessed, being customer-focused. and looking at how we sell all throughout, really that whole process. Whether that's we have no idea who you are through we're courting the relationship, and you're a sales-qualified lead and we're getting you to the sale to we've made the sale and, then, afterwards, how do we actually facilitate that, that post-sale close? And it moves into customer service, and then hopefully they buy more and more and more and more and really looking at how we help to make things a lot easier.
I know in that episode, specifically, that we were talking about looking at the user experience on websites. So looking at ecommerce is a really big thing for manufacturers right now, especially with COVID. It was a big deal, again, before, even bigger now because trade shows and in-person events, all these things, have been greatly reduced or completely eliminated or canceled. And so everyone's been making this switch to how do we sell virtually? How do we create this experience? How do we make it easy for people? And so what we have to do is really get into the minds of our customer and get an understanding of what their pain is, what they're going through, how can we make working with us very easy so it's, man, that was awesome. It's like a click of a button, and boom. Let's eliminate the amount of clicks.
So one thing that I wanted to show, a little show and tell today. This is a catalog. It's very exciting. I got this a couple weeks ago, or maybe a week or two ago. And this is from, believe it or not, Amazon. Now, I'm not sure if they've done this in previous years. I haven't seen it. That doesn't mean they haven't done it, but this caught my eye, and I wanted to share with you what this is. This is, basically, a product catalog. You may think to yourself, "Hey, wait a minute. We're talking– you just mentioned, Danny, about ecommerce and how companies need to make that pivot in the– " Well, yeah, but there's also a thing where, we've also got an interesting thing going on right now which, again, was happening before, but we're seeing it now, is the digital channels have, there's been a massive rush to it. How many virtual events have you seen? How many webinars?