Online customer service is key to fast growth

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Jim had seen all the ads about the hot new company offering travel arrangements online. The site looked great, a home page with music. And there were all those fabulous vacations on sale. He spent an hour browsing the site and even decided to register. That Las Vegas weekend looked great; he decided to buy it. But he had just one question about it first. Thus began Jim's fruitless search for a little help. There was no phone number to call, no place to send an e-mail. Without someone to answer his question, he wasn't about to make this purchase. He abandoned the idea and called his travel agency.

This story is not new but represents perhaps the most critical success factor for the fast growth that emerging companies face today and is repeated thousands of times each day. According to Yankelovich Research, in 1999, sixty-three percent of online customers did not finish an online transaction because they were unable to attain the information they needed. The new economy had ushered in a new kind of thinking about business. If you build a cool Web site, customers will flock to it. Acquiring customers is key, don't worry about retaining them. Make your site "self-service" and customers won't need customer service.

However, it's painfully evident that this "new thinking" was wrong. Emerging companies — no matter how innovative or high tech — can't ignore some tried-and-true business rules. It's great to get customers to your site, but you have to keep them coming back. For online merchants, one key to success is good, old-fashioned customer service.

The technology and strategy deployed by Web merchants has resulted in a distancing of companies from their customers. And customers don't like it. A recent Jupiter Communications study showed that 90 percent of online customers prefer some form of human interaction during an e-commerce transaction.

Technology is now being utilized to bring the Web company closer to its customers. They may be shopping online, but customers want the benefits of human interaction. Forrester Research finds that 37 percent of all online buyers, over 4.8 million shoppers, have requested customer service online.

Bridging the gap between the technology of fast-growth companies and the customer service of traditional organizations are a host of offerings that range from the familiar to the futuristic.

One popular choice is text chat. Customers open up a dialog box and type their conversation with a customer-service representative who is often conducting several "conversations" at once. The interface is immediate, but awkward. Clues contained in the human voice are lost, and most customers are not going to type as complete a conversation as they would speak.

Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, is another solution. Essentially, VoIP provides a phone call carried out over the computer. Once again, this is an immediate contact, but the quality of connection is often poor. VoIP is also currently burdened with a host of technological challenges for customers who need multimedia hardware and good computers skills so they can troubleshoot technical difficulties.

Perhaps the most effective solution available addresses the challenges of online customer service with a familiar technology solution — the telephone.

Online companies need the ability to interact one-to-one with their online customers as well as manage and track that process. There are ASPs that provide just this "telephone" function. When online customers need assistance, they simply click on a "call" icon, and enter their name and phone number. The function then generates a phone call directly to the online company. A phone call is then made to the customer. Now an easy, one-to-one dialog can occur to serve the customer's individual needs.

Companies that offer to balance the technology of fast-growth companies with the traditional business rules of customer service, help emerging organizations avoid becoming dot-com casualties on the information highway.

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Lenington, Eric - (2001, February 5 - 11) Online customer service is key to fast growth - TechBiz