How Relational Commerce Provides Better Customer Experience

Relational Commerce

marketing planLearn more about relational commerce and how it can help improve relations between your business and its customers.

Business is no longer just transactional, as customers need more connections and better
experiences. This is why most companies are building better customer relationships through
relational commerce. What is relational commerce, and how does it impact customer
experience?



What Is Relational Commerce?

Also called relationship commerce, this is a business philosophy aiming to help the business develop deep and continuous relationships with its new and returning consumers. Businesses that use the relational commerce approach use ‘one-to-one’ frictionless relationships instead of the known transactional ‘one-and-done’ commerce.

Relational commerce results in predictable, recurring business revenue with higher lifetime value for customers. To achieve all these benefits, businesses now use relational commerce software solutions to improve their outcome. You can learn more here.

How Does Relational Commerce Work?

Relationship commerce is often a diverse mix of business capabilities and strategies. In many cases, the starting point of relational commerce is a personalized subscription offering. However, a basic subscription offering never actively turns customer transactions into quality relationships. This is why most merchants proceed to offer advanced subscriptions to give customers complete control of their products and reward their loyalty.

A subscription offering delivers convenience to customers while enabling businesses to collect important customer data continuously. Businesses can use the data to continually update, personalize, and fine-tune their offering to customers for better experiences. Think of relational commerce as social commerce where you appeal to a customer’s social needs as you earn their loyalty and profit. Other essential aspects of relational commerce that come with customer subscriptions include:

● Loyalty and reward programs
● Committed plans or contracts
● Membership services
● Clubs
● Instant orders
● Event-based orders
● Predictive re-ordering

Key Elements of Relational Commerce Experiences

The most important elements of relational commerce to customers are:

Frictionless Experience

Customers don’t want friction in their buying journey. Things like a clunky website, excessive touchpoints, delayed responses, auto-billing, hidden prices/fees, poor customer service, or multi-page checkout drive consumers away.

Your business should give shoppers an easy grasp of the value of your product/service and
purchase with very few clicks. Give subscription shoppers complete control over their product,
allowing them control over their billing information, changes in delivery frequency, and the
opportunity to cancel their subscription easily. Avoid shopping friction points to give your
customers a great shopping experience.

Savings

All customers, individuals or businesses, love saving costs on the goods/services they’re
purchasing. Relational commerce not only gives them a convenient and frictionless shopping
experience but also an opportunity to save costs. For example, subscriptions have proven less

expensive than many one-off purchases because of the percentage discounts that come with
continued purchases. These cost savings come on top of other key benefits like instant
download or free shipping.

Personalization of Orders

Successful relational commerce relies on collecting and analyzing essential customer data. This
data can give businesses superior customer insights to help improve their experience. One of
the key customer experiences is service or product personalization. Matching customers with
their needs and offering a guided selling experience often help exceed their expectations,
resulting in re-orders.

Endnote

Consumers today want meaningful shopping experiences. This includes smooth, frictionless
shopping in a short time. Use relational commerce to recognize this customer demand and
focus on giving your customers their precious time by giving a convenient and exceptional
shopping experience.



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Editorial Staff

This article was written by SBMarketingTools.com editorial staff.