February 2000

Where Did The Service In E-Service Go?

BY ROBERT VAHID HASHEMIAN

I still cant believe we are in the year 2000. To tell you the truth, I barely noticed the transition. I was Web surfing on my PC when I noticed it was 20 minutes past midnight. A quick look at NBC, which showed the confetti covering Times Square, confirmed that we had indeed arrived. We have many things to be thankful for. My old Pentium 90 correctly rolled over to year 2000; water, utilities and phone service continued to work and my bank account still showed the same balance of $11.25 from 1999. The second half of the 1990s saw an extraordinary shift in the way we live and conduct business. The Internet, with its many benefits such as e-mail, Web, chat, newsgroups, Internet telephony and multimedia, commanded us with such intensity that today it is difficult to imagine our lives without it. Its great to be a part of this still nascent medium and going forward, there should be no doubt that we will continue to shape the Internet as significantly as it will shape us. In case there is any doubt, one of the greatest boosts helping the explosive growth of the Internet has been e-commerce. Without e-commerce, the Internet would never have reached as far as it has and would not have been able to support its continued growth. Much as the hacker community hates to admit it, it is the force of business that is driving the popularity of the Internet. In our capitalistic society, only money (or the potential to earn it) can propel a medium so far, so fast. But unfortunately, the real support behind all this growth often seems to have been forgotten the consumer.

Like many of you, I used to pay my bills the old-fashioned way: by writing checks, stuffing envelopes, licking stamps and running to the mailbox. This was my method until I opened a bank account with Citibank a few years ago and was introduced to the wonderful world of e-banking. At first, I had to use a modem to connect to Citibanks pool of modems in order to use this service. The Internet killed this approach quickly. Now, I connect to my account from nearly anywhere and do all my banking from one central location. If I had a Citibank credit card or a brokerage account, I could handle all my transactions using this service, as well. But one the greatest features of e-banking was electronic payment. Suddenly, I was paying my bills with just a few strokes of the keyboard and a few clicks of the mouse. It almost made paying bills fun. I got hooked on its convenience immediately. I never required customer service until one day in November when I could not access my account. At first, I thought it was a temporary glitch. Temporary outages have become more unacceptable to consumers, but anyone in my career position would appreciate the fact that they are not completely avoidable. As it turned out, this was no temporary blackout. It was as if the site had never existed. By mid-afternoon, I decided to find out what the problem was. The main Citibank site was still up, but there were no messages or references to the outage, no numbers provided to call and no e-mail addresses to use to direct questions regarding Citibanks online service. I did finally find a link that connected to the same dead server I had been trying to access. Is this a way for a large bank to service its customers, specifically those customers trying to use this new way of banking who could easily abandon it at the slightest problem? I finally called the phone number on the back of my ATM card and was transferred twice before reaching the correct department. The agent explained that the site had crashed and with all the personnel out for Veterans Day, they had decided to leave it in its broken state until the following day. This was unbelievable to me. Had they ever heard of pagers, 24-hour service or at least some pretense to show they cared for their customers? The agent finally provided me with a backup URL to access my account, but I wonder how many of Citibanks customers were turned off by such a blatant lack of service.

I didnt tell this story to single out Citibank. I am still a Citibank customer, albeit a bit disappointed by this incident. What happened to Citibank happens to many popular sites all too often. This past holiday season, many Web sites, experiencing higher than usual traffic, either went dead or slowed to a crawl enough to have their potential customers turn to other sites or just head for the nearest mall. Toys R Us provided a good example of this behavior when their otherwise successful marketing campaign came literally crashing down when their Web servers came face-to-face with the stampede of would-be online browsers and shoppers. There were also plenty of horror stories regarding unfulfilled orders, wrong shipments and a broad lack of customer service.

Its not only drastic events such as long-term outages that frustrate customers. How many times have you sent an e-mail to a company, only to have that e-mail apparently fall into a black hole? It has happened to me so often that when I need customer service, I automatically pick up the phone and wait through the elevator music to get a live agent. This is a shame, considering that I use e-mail all the time to communicate, and all a company needs to do is to have the courtesy to send me a response. It really isnt that difficult.

So here is my wish list for every e-commerce site as the new millennium gets under way:

• Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Sure it may cost some money, but can you afford to turn away paying customers when that server finally crashes?
• Be honest. If a service has crashed, dont give browsers the runaround. State the nature of the problem on your home page and get busy fixing it. Tomorrow is too late.
• Be accessible. Please give us the information we need to contact you.
• Answer e-mail. All you need to do is to hit the reply button and send me a comment. It would make a world of difference.
• Dont force us to read FAQs. I hate reading a 20-page FAQ list only to find it has no useful data that solve my problem. FAQ pages are not e-service. Service us on our terms, because we are still your customer.

We all want to see e-commerce continue its strong growth. It has plenty of space for that. But without proper e-service, we may end up squashing it before it has a chance to show its potential. Put the service back in e-service and you may be amazed at how quickly your customers will put the sales back in e-sales.

The author may be contacted at rhashemian@tmcnet.com.