Date:
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Author:
Chris Morley
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Fear And Loathing In Lost Business

The custom integration market is overflowing with companies fighting for your hard earned money. Many integrators are simply missing the mark when it comes to earning your business and delivering a fantastic custom experience. How do you pick the right one?

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The Purchasing Experience

As with most custom integrators, first impressions are derived from their website. There are entire books dedicated to “return on design” – the actual philosophy of designing a website for snagging the business of a prospective client.

A cluttered house is a good insight into an individual’s personality, and the same yardstick can be applied to a website. While we’re not advocating judging a book by its cover, more often than not a directionless website with cluttered pages does not instill confidence and may confuse a customer, leading to inbound calls that only waste a company’s time when the information should be clearly laid out online. Lack of focus on a website will many times manifest itself in more ways than one should a prospective customer choose to purchase a system.

Beyond that, the impersonal nature of purchasing online has to be breached by a company in a proactive way once someone hands over their credit card information and are charged the price of a down payment on a car. Timely order acknowledgement is only the first step – letting the customer know when their credit card is charged is also good business practice, as is sending an “invoice” that lists the configuration that a customer ordered. That can cut down on RMAs from people who may have incorrectly ordered a part they did not wish to receive.

Beyond that, passive interaction via a company’s website is always a bonus that goes a long way to instill confidence and ward off premature “buyer’s remorse”. Being able to log into your own account and see the progress of the system you purchased should be standard practice by any company.

Of course, all of this is a moot point if you’re looking at purchasing a system via a retail outlet. As we’ve shown previously, the retail purchasing experience can be as varied as its online counterpart, and there are no guarantees.

One thing that is a constant in our evaluations is that, on the whole, the sales forces of the boutiques are light years ahead in knowledge when compared to the retail chains. This is because the staff hired at the retail level is typically young, and is more akin to order takers than those who pick up the phones at a boutique, where the person on the other end may pull double duty in building the machines themselves.

This doesn’t mean you won’t encounter snake oil salesmen in either realm, and certainly those with more knowledge may take advantage of unsuspecting consumers by “upselling” them hardware they have no need of. But if you want to know the right configuration for playing the latest video game, you’ll find it more times than not with an online vendor.