A: For many e-business owners, customer service is considered overhead. Another expense that they can skimp on. But remember, the same conventions and outlets you provide as a means for customers to contact you after the sale will also be used by prospective customers with pre-sales questions. It''s a big mistake to fail to understand the potential of pre-sales support in increasing your average order size and in closing more sales.
Of course, the point of selling on the Web is that you publish all the information customers need, then you let the products sell themselves, and the cost of any additional transaction is trivial (credit card authorization, e.g.). That''s the theory, anyway. In practice, sites that accept orders both by phone and on the Web often find that their phone orders are twice the size of their Web orders, in part because the sales reps can up-sell and cross-sell the customers ("would you like some fries with that"). The last time I placed an order with Eddie Bauer and phoned it in (because there was a price discrepancy between the catalog I''d received and the Web site), I ended up ordering an extra sweater and pair of pajamas that I hadn''t planned on ordering.
The Options for Sales and Customer Service
You have several choices for providing customer service and sales support on your site. From least responsive to most responsive, they are:
It goes without saying that customer service is vitally important. The days when all shoppers were mavericks who could navigate your site with ease, knew exactly what they wanted, and were too cocky, in any case, to ask for help are gone! Bizrate.com, probably the best source of research on what makes online shoppers tick, reported that in the second quarter of 1999, 20% of all online purchases involved customer service contact, and customers who did contact customer service were significantly less likely to return to that merchant''s site. This tells us one of two things: These shoppers had problems with their purchases (e.g. fulfillment, being overcharged, order status questions that couldn''t be answered the site); and the shoppers had such lousy customer service experiences (waiting a week or more to hear back by e-mail, waiting on hold 30 minutes to talk to a representative), that they became further disenchanted with the site. More likely, it''s a little of both.
Customer Support by FAQ or Knowledgebase
Depending on what you''re selling, this may be an adequate solution to address 80% or more of your customer service inquiries. If you add e-mail support, to pick up the difference, you might actually be able to keep your customers very happy, if your customers are already tech-savvy, and you are selling a technical product or service.
RightNow Technologies (http://www.rightnowtech.com) has an interesting tool that permits you to create a knowledgebase as you go so that all customer service inquiries and answers get catalogued and can be accessed by customers. This helps sites get over the start-up hurdle of building a knowledgebase.
Customer Support by E-mail
Every new site that comes online thinks they''ll just handle customer inquiries by e-mail, and it won''t be a big deal. They''re wrong. There are so many things wrong with doing customer support by e-mail, that any list is bound to be incomplete. Here''s a partial list of all the problems with support by e-mail:
- Many inquiries take multiple correspondences to be satisfied. Customers will often write asking for information, but not give enough information for reps to answer, so then the reps need to write back asking for more information, which the customers must provide, and so on. Also, friendly e-mail answers often create the perception of a relationship (which is good), but then encourage the customer to continue to ask questions (which is bad). I had the opportunity to answer customer service e-mail for a while for one of my clients, and I was amazed at the inefficiency of e-mail. The reps end up answering the same questions over and over. Even with canned responses, customizing them is time consuming, and a large proportion of customers wrote back with unrelated questions once I''d answered the first question, apparently feeling like they "had me on the line" so they''d ask any questions they had about anything related to any of the products (even use instructions for products we didn''t carry).
- E-mail isn''t real time. Shoppers buy in real time and if you can''t answer the question when they''re on your site, thinking about buying the product, they might not come back or might not remember what they thought they needed the next time they visit. Relying on e-mail for pre-sales support is an enormous opportunity missed.
- Customers expect e-mail answers back right away. Even though you might think of e-mail support as a great activity for slow times, customers are used to corresponding with their friends and family and receiving replies back in minutes. A customer who has no real opinion about your site could easily become disaffected when your idea of a prompt response isn''t prompt enough for him.
- Quality assurance is difficult. Even if you have an e-mail management system that permits auditing of sent messages, most sites find they''re so inundated with e-mail that they don''t have time to use the auditing features, and don''t do any substantive quality assurance. A sales rep on the phone with a bad attitude is easy enough to spot and remove, but how many messages go out from a disgruntled sales or service rep by e-mail before you determine that there''s a problem. Spelling and grammar are important to lots of customers. Will you antagonize them by having under-educated scribners answering e-mail?
Jupiter Communications reported that 42% of Web sites they contacted for customer service assistance did not respond within 5 days. How many sites budgeted for 20% of their Christmas purchases to require customer support? Everyone counted on the traffic and the sales, but did anyone ramp up proportionately for the additional support burden?
The Most Expensive Option: Phone Support
Including an 800 number on your Web site is a must for all serious online merchants. Some sites offer to take a customer''s phone number, and return the call, although I really can''t see the appeal of sitting, waiting for my phone to ring to get customer support (especially if I only have one phone line and I have to disconnect to wait for the call). Unfortunately, many sites either don''t post an 800 number, or don''t have the infrastructure to handle the load of phone calls they receive. I called E*trade less than a month ago and the message informed me that I could expect to hold for at least 30 minutes. That sure motivated me to send e-mail!
According to the must-read book Now or Never: How Business Must Change Today to Win the Battle for Internet Consumers by Mary Modahl, vice president of research for Forrester Communications, mainstream consumers are just starting to shop online in 2000-2001. Up until now it''s been primarily high-income technology optimists who are primarily career motivated: people like us who are willing to put up with a lot because we believe in the potential of the medium. When mainstream shoppers arrive, either sites are going to have to offer more customer service and sales support on their sites, or they''re going to see skyrocketing customer service costs; how much more often will your mother contact customer service than you do?
Now or Never reports that an order placed by phone costs $3.90, and the same order placed on the Web costs $.20. Should you accept phone orders or not? What''s your average basket size? What''s your average margin? Say with a bit of training your sales reps can double the basket size of phone orders. If your margin times your average basket size is more than $3.90, then it''s worth it to accept phone orders. Do the math for yourself.
Of course, it''s difficult to accept phone orders and not handle customer service on the phone, as well, so companies often do arrange for inordinately long wait times on customer service lines to (ahem) encourage callers to find the answers to their questions on the Web site. Once you have customers on hold, waiting for help, fax-back services, or including answers to the most common questions as part of the hold chatter can help to reduce the number of customers that ultimately talk to a rep.
Don''t Decision-Makers Use AOL?
Some people simply need to talk to a person before purchasing complex items, like computers or insurance. Fewer than 50% of households that can be expected to begin shopping online within the next two years have second phone lines in their homes, which means that in order to talk to your customer support person, these shoppers need to disconnect their computers from the Internet. If these shoppers are with AOL, and they aren''t sophisticated enough to know that they can surf the Web from another browser, using AOL just to connect, then they can expect to have their browser closed and all content lost when they disconnect. For AOL shoppers with only one phone line, shopping has to be either entirely online, or entirely by phone. Given that AOL''s customer base is so large, it''s remarkable that so few merchants have realized the importance of this actuality.
Real-time Sales and Customer Service Chat
The only customer service option that really fits the speed of the Internet, or at least the only one until computer phones are commonplace, is real-time chat. Since September 1999 (and just prior to this year''s record-breaking online holiday shopping season), the number of sites offering this type of customer service has grown phenomenally. Land''s End is one of the more prominent sites to offer real-time chat. Even at their peak hours, it works well.
While shopping at both the Gap and Land''s End, I had the experience of finding that their sizing page didn''t give the conversion between the garment I wanted to buy and their sizing scale. With the Gap, I had to call customer service, and have the rep look up the sizing conversion. It turned out to be the wrong chart. I had to return the item, and my confidence in their phone support was shaken. The call wasted 20 minutes of my time. With Land''s End, I was able to chat with a customer service rep in real time to find the sizing conversion. The entire process took six minutes, even during Land''s End''s peak hours. Land''s End uses WebLine (http://www.webline.com) as their chat tool.
While testing out real-time chat at another site, the sales rep was able to push a URL out to my computer, opening up a new browser session for me to view. This site was using LivePerson as the chat tool (http://www.liveperson.com). Out of curiosity, I asked the Land''s End rep whether she could push me the page of a complementary product she tried to cross-sell me (case in point!), and she told me she couldn''t get it to work, but gave me instructions to find it on the site.
Unsurprising Conclusions
True to the Bizrate report, my Gap sales support experience makes me less likely to shop there again, but contrary to the Bizrate report, my Land''s End sales support experience makes me more likely to shop there again. It will be interesting when Bizrate starts asking customers after the sale not only whether they contacted customer service, but also what avenue of customer service support was utilized.
Regardless of which customer support option you implement, the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than the cost of getting an existing customer to return and buy again. Customer support is part of the entire shopping experience for your shoppers. Ignoring the importance of a solid customer support system puts not only your reputation at risk, but can actually cost you income in the long run.
Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com
