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The Devil is in the Detail: Online Platforms and Customer Satisfaction
Online platforms have dramatically changed the digital economy over the past two decades and occupy a central position within the digital society. They have revolutionized access to information and played a positive role in global markets by better connecting buyers and sellers of information, services, and goods.
The role of online platforms is key in delivering benefits to consumers and businesses: Online platforms are bringing together different stakeholders, allowing trades that would otherwise not be able to happen.
Usage of online platforms is integrated in our daily lives. Whether it is screening through Facebook during our coffee-breaks, searching for holidays on platforms promising us to provide us with the best deals, or researching new business contacts via Linked-In.
Platforms provide a key engine for growth and social development locally as well as globally. And the online platform economy provides major opportunities for innovations within new as well as traditional sectors, used to organize themselves as platforms.
Interaction between Customers and Online Platform Providers
Companies active within the market of online platform services try to facilitate automatization as far as possible. Mainly under two strategic rationales: Firstly, to improve the user experience, and secondly to shape costs by creating more efficient back-end processes. So it seems to be a no-brainer that automatization is one of the key overall objectives of online platform services. But with the highest degree of automatization being of peak interest to most online platform business models, usability and customer orientation of these services can fall by the wayside.
Platforms are not necessarily designed with a thorough understanding of the range of current and potential users and their respective needs, priorities, and preferences. This can result in services that are not fit for their purpose, gaps in information and knowledge provision, unnecessary duplication of efforts and an overall misuse of resources.
The Energy Online Platform: E-nable+
But what differentiates E-nable+ from competitors and similar products or other platform providers in general? E-nable+ offers users a customer oriented and holistic service, with the goal to increase direct contact between our professional team and our users.
We believe that building long-lasting relationships with our customers cannot be done when only relying on chatbots or mailing programs. In an information sensitive environment such as the energy industry, trust and selective communication are key. We want to deliver value to our users, hence we explicitly want to get their voice heard in order to improve our services on a continuously basis
Our overall aim is to provide a highly sophisticated user experience, incorporating our different users and improving our services on a constant basis.
This ultimately leads to the fact that people want to speak with people. We have made the experience that if a customer has issues or questions, he/she would prefer to be able to contact a ‘real’ employee to discuss possible solutions or get support. Although we do not underestimate the importance of secondary support material (such as FAQs, etc.), we put real customer service first.
How E-nable+ lives this concept of user integration and support:
- Personal Upload Services
Creating standardized forms for either energy Freelancers, Projects, and Tenders is a long-lasting process. But Usability shows, that in a diverse and fast-changing environment, everybody needs custom solutions. Therefore we want to provide our customers such as energy Project Owners, Freelancers, and Tender Issuers with a customized service. With this we want to guarantee the best possible use of our platform for each customer and furthermore, aim to deliver value through making our services most efficient for our customers.
- Reaching out to every new customer
Registering for new platforms can seem exhausting. Once you’ve put your registration details in it, users tend to get an overload of information and do in most cases not exactly now how to deal with the presented value on promotion packages, website etc.
Therefore we try to reach out every customer, providing personal introduction sessions, talk about the intention why to use our platform and to discuss issues and questions. Usability is important, but personal communication cannot be replaced when it comes to customer satisfaction.
- There is a problem or you have further ideas for improvement?
Welcome in our world – We love to get feedback, to discuss issues and to improve our solution. We do not want to offer an “almost-perfect” service and our goal is to avoid standing still. So we need our users and customers to tell us how we can improve and deliver most value to you.