Other Articles by Brian Walsh

The Almighty and All-Important Consumer, Columnists, February 8, 1999 It's Not a Digital Market, It's a Digital Payment System, Columnists, March 8, 1999 XML: Revenge of the Nerds, Columnists, April 5, 1999 XML: An API for Every Web Site, Columnists, May 3, 1999 Understanding Internet Payment Protocols, Workshops, May 3, 1999

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Top of the Stack By David Willis On the Edge By Art Wittmann

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Given the growth in the numbers of participants and investment dollars, e-commerce can be likened to a carful of teenagers on spring break with a full tank of gas and a new credit card: The future looks bright, but do they have any real idea where they're going? How can you ensure that your e-commerce site not only survives but prospers during what promises to be a potentially turbulent adolescence?

Too Young To Take Over, Too Old To Ignore Like that of most adolescents, e-commerce's growth has been uneven, with its share of problems. In his book The Only Thing That Matters: Bringing the Power of the Customer Into the Center of Your Business (Harper Business, 1993), author Karl A. Albrecht states, "In its most simple-minded form, the customer service approach has become an undisciplined search for gimmicks to try to get the employees to 'be nice' and the customers to 'be happy.'" Albrecht goes on to warn of malfunctioning organizations that create mechanized services for all customers, as when insurance companies concentrate on processing claims rather than "helping people get their lives, health or property back to normal." Similarly, it is too easy at a Web site to focus on mindlessly processing transactions.

I submit that the challenge for existing e-commerce sites is not expansion of number of products or number of hits; the challenge is to figure out how to listen to Web visitors/customers.

To accomplish this, you need to create a new concept of "customer service"--in fact, discarding the term is a good way to start. Customer service is inextricably linked to the traditional call center--that large but obscure part of your organization where you have well-meaning, hard-working, underpaid saints who bear the abuse of customers with issues, problems and complaints. But what we need--and have the opportunity to create--on the Web is an ongoing, 24-hour-a-day focus group. A focus group brings to mind images of interesting people, a low-pressure environment and an exchange of ideas. It's your chance to find out what your customers--your most important asset--are thinking.

Given the maturity of the call center (sophisticated PBX and computer-telephony integration systems, dedicated professional management, and 20 years of implementation history), it's amazing that almost all customers dread picking up the phone to use it. Who looks forward to calling an 800 number? Conversely, we must strive to make using a Web site come across as an enjoyable experience, and it should be; it can combine information, entertainment, transactions and customer service.

All points of contact with your organization, whether by phone, on the Web or across the counter, must be integrated with a single logical database image of the customer and his or her transactions. Unfortunately, the current products that link Web users with customer-service agents miss the point. The customer-service agent who splits his or her time between the Web and the phone does not represent the future. Whenever a customer leaves the Web site to pick up the phone, it represents a failure of the Web to satisfy the customer and is the start of an escalating chain that consumes time and money for telecom costs and staff charges. Customer service needs to be resolved online during the session with no interruption. You are kidding yourself if you think Web users will have the patience to accept anything else.

It's time for businesses to raise their expectations for Web customer service. It's not enough to give status--"You still don't have your order?"--and dump users into the no-man's land of FAQs. Online customers need access to as sophisticated a knowledge base as possible, with an interface that is as easy to use as you can make it. That can only be accomplished by measuring and tuning the site against two central metrics that create value for the customer: The ability to find information and the ability to resolve customer problems.

As an industry, in order to maintain anything approaching recent growth rates, we must consistently increase the number of "average" people (those who make less than three times the average income) who become comfortable doing their shopping online. But is that a reasonable expectation given the current state of site design? Is the kind of customer service provided on the Web the kind that will create an environment that makes the larger body of hesitant consumers comfortable? Judging from the sites I visit each day, I would have to say "No."

Successful companies see their customers as unique people, and the objective of these companies is to understand their customers' needs. Once understood, the organization can focus on creating value and fulfilling those needs. Forrester Research describes this as a virtuous circle: increasing numbers of customers go online; once online they demand more content and services; content and services attract partners and associates who, in turn, point more customers to the site.

Virtual Customer Service There are several strategies to bolster Internet customer service. First, even as you strive to refine your site, remember it's a journey without an end. Think about CRM (customer relationship management) software. But creating a unified view of data across access methods (telephone, Interactive Voice Response and the Web) and across agents, employees and partners is much more involved than you might think.

Rather than dealing with your entire site and all its pages, concentrate on just one area--the search page. Why focus on searching? Well, if your home page didn't wow visitors and entice them to respond, register or buy, your search page is your last hope. A search request is a plea for help. If you don't give a Web visitor what he or she wants right then and there, your potential customer disappears like a shooting star. You should have only one goal for your search page--to create value, not deploy gimmicks.

If the search experience is nonexistent, trivial or just plain broken, it most likely means the conversation is ended. Rather than poring over hit statistics and figuring out new ways to bulk up content based on introspective internal meetings, the site's staff should monitor the search requests over time and evaluate how well the site is responding and how it can improve. The search results page is the natural place to begin integrating tools to do that, including e-mail routing systems, chat, Web-to-telephony links and data conferencing.

Before you race to integrate every bell and whistle, though, look at your search mechanism. Wizards and keyword queries do not reflect how most people think. Remember, most people don't think in Boolean; we explore by asking questions. We have reached a point at which the information to be managed is growing and the CPU power to handle the processing and parsing of natural-language queries is available and inexpensive. In the short term, the knowledge base of question templates these systems require as a basis to translate the user's English questions into confirming questions to Boolean queries and results sets serve another purpose: They document in detail the needs and desires of your customer. The key is the analysis of the question logs and modifying both the question-template structures and the design of the site to better serve the customer.

Consider the case of Bell South. The company is brewing up a series of local sites collectively referred to as the "Buzz" (the Atlanta Buzz, the Charlotte Buzz and so on). The site is in beta at the time of this writing. Bell South is adopting a strategy for search as an entry point for customer service. The approach is threefold: A question processing engine from Ask Jeeves (ask.com) is used to provide a natural-language front end; Ask Jeeves links to Bell South's knowledge base of support for its ISP dial-in customers; from the same page, the customer can use Inktomi to search the Web and use Bell South's Yellow Pages to find local merchants.

In practice, a natural-language front end for searches can be used as a single customer point of entry. From there, results can be delivered as a traditional Web keyword result, intelligently routed e-mail and routed chat, or to traditional call-center solutions. The strength of these natural language front ends is paradoxically in their maintenance. Sites that strive to uncover more information about customers will pay careful attention to the questions posed and proactively update the knowledge base. In this new view of customer service, representatives cease to be the receptors of customer-generated grief and become the editors of customer-generated intelligence.

Brian Walsh is founder of bwalsh.com, a Portland, Ore., consulting firm specializing in Internet and client/server product strategies, development and testing. Send your comments on this column to him at brian@bwalsh.com.