This story appears in the
December 2000 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Just as in the world of brick-and-mortar, customer service can
make or break your e-business. Yet dealing with customers online
presents a daunting set of challenges. A recent survey conducted by
Jupiter Research revealed 72 percent of online buyers cite customer
service as a critical factor in their online shopping satisfaction,
but only 41 percent are satisfied with the service they've
received.
A variety of customer service solutions are hitting the Web to
mend this weak link in the e-commerce chain. Busy netpreneurs are
finding two types of third-party services useful: sans humans or
humans included. Either way, the aim is to reduce expensive support
phone calls and piles of unanswered e-mail.
Virtual customer support presents a low-cost, low-personnel
option, but functionality is limited. Approaches range from the use
of Interactive Voice Response systems to cartoon assistants.
Somewhere in the middle are services like Ask Jeeves' natural language
technology-essentially the same as the Ask Jeeves search engine,
but applied to customer service on participating sites.
The top choice for online human-assisted customer service is
chat. Chat offers the advantage of real-time interaction accessible
directly from businesses' Web sites. Companies like LivePerson offer this high-tech
Internet version of a traditional call center. Although the costs
have to be closely examined, one-on-one service is the ideal for
customer support.
A June 2000 study by Datamonitor reported a loss of $6.1 billion
in online sales due to poor customer service in 1999. That figure
indicates that top-level service isn't a luxury; it's a
necessity that pays off in added sales and repeat customers.
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