OzContacts, a local social technology success story!

OzContacts is an online retailer of contact lenses and related items that began locally in Milton and has now grown to be the fourth largest online retailer in this category. Social technologies have had a large part to play in the success of this company since its humble beginnings in 2009. Particular functional areas at OzContacts that have the most to gain through use of social technologies are "marketing and sales" and "customer service".

What truly separates OzContacts from the competition is customer service that goes above and beyond that which is expected by the customer. One way OzContacts achieves this is through the implementation of Zopim live chat software on their website.

Zopim is a Singapore startup that specialises in providing a live chat platform that can be easily integrated into any website. Additionally, Zopim works well with several other customer-focused applications such as Netsuite and Highrise. Through providing instant online chat to customers using this technology, OzContacts has effectively succeeded in using social technologies to provide customer care, one of the ten value levers outlined in a report by the McKinsey Global Institute. In addition to allowing customers to speak to a real person without picking up a phone, Zopim provides location and device information as well as tracking how a customer arrived at the website. This information allows OzContacts customer service representatives to derive greater insight into the customer from the beginning of the chat.

The CRM system OzContacts currently has in place is Netsuite. Since OzContacts is a business in the growth stage, they could greatly benefit from purchasing the marketing automation extension available to assist with the generation and fostering of sales leads.

The benefits of a system such as this is allowing for potential sales leads to be automatically generated from the company website; these leads can be identified according to multiple pre-identified criteria, including customer insights obtained via Drupal chat. This makes a lot more sense than simply cold calling, for a business that has built its reputation on having an exceptional customer experience. 

Lastly, OzContacts is using popular social networking site Facebook as an extremely effective tool for marketing communication/interaction.

Whilst being only a small company with limited external visibility, OzContacts has garnered more than 4,000 likes on Facebook thus far. In addition to using Facebook as a method to market to both old and new customers, OzContacts also uses Facebook as a medium for providing customer care.

Question for my readers: Have you ever used an online chat function before, either as a customer or retailer? If so, did you find it to be positive or negative experience in comparison to a phone call?