Web customer service grinch that stole Christmas, The

Call Center CRM Solutions,  Nov 2000  by Tehrani, Rich

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Only 3.5 Percent Of -All Sites Surveyed Have Acceptable E-Mail Service

The customer service Grinch may be an invention of my imagination, but there are more than a few elements of reality in the idea. Online shopping this holiday season is already showing the potential to seem more like a horror movie than a fairy tale. According to a comprehensive e-commerce study from C.E. Unterberg, Towbin (www.unterberg.com), we are on the cusp of another holiday season of unacceptable e-sales and e-service experiences. Last year, some of the missteps of e-tailers could have been chalked up to inexperience and the fact that e-commerce was still a relatively new frontier. These problems included, but were not limited to, ignoring customer e-mail, missing shipping deadlines, having no visible returns policy and a host of other problems. There should be no more excuses this year.

What amazes me is what is at stake. There will be over 11 million households shopping online this year for the very first time. Added to the number of households that already shop online, this equates to over 28 million households in total. According to Forrester Research, these households will spend an estimated $657 billion dollars online this year. By 2004, the amount will increase to $6.8 trillion!

Perhaps the market is so large that many Web retailers believe they need not even try to implement good service on their Web sites. This is a grave mistake. Datamonitor estimates that $6.1 billion dollars in lost sales may be attributed to poor customer service on retail Web sites. In practical terms, the average retailer could have increased revenue by 35 percent had they provided better online customer service.

I suggest that anyone who is interested in learning more about this informative study acquire a copy to read in-depth. In the interest of space, I cannot explore the study results here as thoroughly as I would like (the editors are fond of their page real estate and I couldn't cajole them into additional pages this month!). I will, however, highlight some of the key points of the CEUT study:

* Though 184 out of the 200 online retailers offered e-mail capabilities, only 20 offered text chat, two had voice over IP capabilities and two offered text chat and Web callback.

* All of these "e-mail friendly" sites were sent a "generic" question.

* The sites' e-mail response time ranged from one minute to more than five days, and 41 sites never responded at all!

* The top 100 most popular sites actually had worse CRM performance than the other, less-well-known sites.

* There has' been a negligible difference in these CRM levels since last year's survey.

* Only 7 out of 200 e-tailers responded in five minutes or less, a response time I would call an acceptable level of service.

Armed with this survey, I decided to solicit my own editors and other fellow TMC team members to help me come up with a list of the top 15 practices that are vital in providing a great ecommerce experience for your customers this holiday season:

1. Always provide a method of contatting customer service on your Web site, whether it is via e-mail, toll-free number, Web chat, Web callback or call-through - and respond promptly.

2.Make sure you synchronize your offers (e.g., avoid having one price on a promotional flyer and a different one on your Web site) and avoid conflicting messages so that regardless of how your customer contacts you, he or she will get the same information.

3. Make customer information available across all forms of customer interaction media. The most obvious case being a phone call transferred from one department to another, but this also applies to dual-media inquiries. For example, if the customer sends an email and then follows up with a phone call, the agent must have access to the customer's initial e-mail.

4. If you provide self-service, give users the option of contacting a live person (all self-service solutions, no matter how omnipotent, have flaws or blind spots.)

5. Try to be cheerful. It is the holiday season, and customers are as hardpressed for time as you and your agents. Sometimes, a kind word is enough to close a sale.

6. Make sure your front- and backend systems are well integrated. There's no point in taking orders if you can't process them.

7. Ensure your warehousing is in order and you can fill orders as promised. Some e-tailers' errors in this department last year prompted Federal Trade Commission investigations.

8. Have a simple returns policy in place and make sure this information is posted visibly on your site.

9. Monitor your contact center's staffing levels. Always have live help available to answer shopper's questions.

10. If you send an auto-response email promising a more personalized response later, make sure you keep that promise.

11. Have state-of-the-art data security in place. Nothing would be worse than hearing on CNN about your customers' credit card numbers being stolen from your Web site.

12.Make sure to have measures in place to check for fraudulent credit card charges.