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A good Web site designed for e-commerce has become indispensable to
furthering a business' growth. First, the Web site must attract visitors.
Second, it must draw visitors to appropriate pages and entice them to buy
the products being sold or invest in the services offered. The visitors'
histories and amount of time spent on certain pages should be tracked.
Third, and perhaps most important, the site must provide a positive
experience for visitors. For example, visitors will likely have questions
before buying and may want to conveniently contact live agents for answers
to sales or technical questions. If the Web site allows visitors to e-mail
company representatives or have an interactive chat with agents skilled in
answering specific questions, customer satisfaction increases
dramatically.
More and more tools are being developed to help companies improve
customer service and sales on their Web sites. One of these products comes
from MATRAnet, which has released its second version its M>WebTouch
product. This system works with the Windows NT Server or Solaris operating
systems and the Microsoft SQL Server or Sybase databases. M>WebTouch is
separated into three graphical interfaces for specific users:
administrators, supervisors and agents. Each interface works in
conjunction with one another to create an overall application that will
appeal to companies dedicated to e-business.
Installation
The M>WebTouch server works with Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service
Pack 3 or higher and a recommended 128 MB of RAM. The administration,
supervisor, agent, tracker and other applications are all installed
separately. However, for our evaluation copy, these applications were
installed all at once. This software installation presented no problems.
For the server to work, we did need to extend our trial agreement, but
this was done easily by updating the older file with the appropriate one.
It is not required to install the tracker because the M>WebTouch
server can work independently from the tracker. This might be a viable
choice for businesses that do not rely on customer profiles and would
rather keep an agent's job more traditional.
However, most often, the tracker presents an effective means of
profiling potential and real customers who visit a company's Web site, and
accurate reports can be assessed from that information. The tracker
usually resides on a different computer than the M>WebTouch server.
From the client, information is transferred to the tracker where it is
profiled and then goes through a Web proxy to the M>WebTouch server.
The administrator, supervisor or agent can access this information at this
point. Since users can search and replace their HTML encoding on the fly,
companies can more easily place links on their Web sites to connect to the
M>WebTouch server directly or to connect to a chat room with an agent.
From the administrator GUI, you can monitor and look at system-specific
events in real-time with the server, and you can add supervisor
information to the system -- in turn, supervisors add agent information
from their GUI. Administrators also set up plug-ins, e-mail, the database,
customer support features, languages and templates used for the system and
the tracker. Users designate where their trackers are located on their
networks by entering their IP addresses as the tracker host. Users must
also designate a WWW host, which may be in the form of the home Web pages.
Then, users must enter the virtual host, which is often the same as the
tracker host. Tracker port and WWW port numbers must also be administered.
If there are any problems, manual changes can also be made from the
services icon in the Windows control panel. We should also note that a DNS
server must be installed for the tracker to work properly.
Documentation
The documentation consists of three guides targeted at the
administrator, supervisor and agent. These guides are well laid out and
are very easy to follow. They all have a detailed table of contents and
index and have plenty of screen shots to help guide users. We have only a
few complaints about these guides. Many parts of the installation sections
are repetitive and could be explained in a more succinct fashion. On
occasion, the screenshots do not quite match up with what is being
discussed in the manual. For example, in the incoming mailbox section of
the administration guide, the screenshot shown is the outgoing tab. We
also noticed a few typos, grammatical errors and areas where text
deletions should be made.
The biggest problem with the doc-umentation is with the help files, or
more appropriately, the lack thereof. Users are offered only an
"about the interface" dialog box. While the guides are
informative and are also included on the CD-ROM in PDF format, help files
should be available on the interfaces themselves so users can research a
topic quickly.
Features And Operational Testing
The interface for the supervisor consists of eight tabs, which are
organized to create and customize agent and customer profiles and to
monitor agent productivity and requests. Each tab of this interface is
straightforward and intuitive. For instance, to activate standard pre-set
messages, supervisors add new groups or messages for agents to use with
only a few button clicks and by typing specific prompts.
In addition to setting up agent and customer profiles, supervisors can
also create and assign hints to individual agents and customers in much
the same way as other skills-based routing applications. If an agent has a
specific area of expertise or is more likely to be able to answer a
certain type of question, then that agent would be assigned the incoming
customer request. When assigning these hints, each skill is weighted and
its priority level is given. The higher the priority level, the more
likely the agent will be assigned a request dealing with that topic. For
example, if an agent speaks Spanish, that agent would be routed a call
from a Spanish-speaking customer. Also, a customer's request can be routed
to the appropriate agent based on the customer's history on the Web site
or by keywords in the customer's message. If that agent is unavailable,
then the request is rolled over to the next most appropriate agent.
Administrators and agents can also assign hints, but these hints are not
based on skills-based routing. Administrators can assign hints to Web
pages, indicating specific details of the page's content. Agents assign
hints to customers to describe their special needs and interests in the
same manner that supervisors can.
The supervisor also controls the status and reporting features of M>WebTouch.
When clicking on the status tab, supervisors can view which agents are
waiting for requests, are in a Web collaboration call, are paused while in
that call (to access information for the customer or for other reasons)
and which agents are about to finish the call. Supervisors can be informed
about requests in a general overview or by the individual agent. There are
many different types of reports that can be requested, including a
breakdown of the top 10 referrals to your Web site, where customers are
leaving your site and for traffic distribution. These reports help
determine where your Web site can be improved as well as show how many
agents are likely to be needed on a given day and time.
To post a Web page that agents would view from their back-office tab,
the supervisor must enter the URL at the lower end of the settings tab of
the supervisor's interface. Agents use the back-office tab for customer
service-related information on the Intranet, such as price lists and
product descriptions. The only problem here is that after agents access a
new screen from the back office, they cannot go back to the original page
without exiting out of and then back into their interface. Navigational
buttons, such as the ones found under the WWW tab (back, forward and
refresh buttons), would alleviate this problem. Ads can also be placed in
that window, which is easily created from the ads tab of the supervisor's
interface.
To be able to test M>WebTouch's agent features, TMC� Labs set up a
customer Web page in the back-office window. Then, we connected to an
agent as a Web visitor -- both located on the same PC (only done for lab
testing purposes). We were able to chat from customer to agent, look at
the customer profile, push URLs to the customer, search the Web and write
e-mail to the customer without problems. On rare occasions, however, the
agent's interface processed slowly when switching between tabs. We were
working on a 333 Mitac industrial computer with 320 Megs of RAM. Granted,
we were running all of the M>WebTouch applications on that computer,
but this still shouldn't happen. When it did run too slowly, we exited out
and then logged back in to the computer, at which time the agent's
interface ran faster.
Room For Improvement
In an upcoming release of M>WebTouch, many improvements that we
would have suggested here have already been addressed (see
sidebar). However, we would like to reinforce some of what was said
earlier as well as add new suggestions. Back, forward and refresh buttons
should and will be added to the back-office feature so users can navigate
through the pages more easily and need not quit and then log back into the
agent's interface. On a similar note, we would like to see improvements in
the processing speed so that M>WebTouch will not slow down and require
the user to quit the application and then log back in again.
There should be a way to attach files to an e-mail directly from the
agent's interface so that both URLs and files can be sent to a customer.
Also, there should be the ability for right-click options on every screen
of all the interfaces. While the focus should still be on a one-to-one
customer/agent interaction, an option for agents to perform multiple chats
at the same time, whether it is with other agents or with different
customers, would be a nice touch.
To further personalize the customer/agent relationship, we would
suggest adding software or hardware that integrates with ACDs into a
switch. In this way, customers can request a voice Web callback from the
agent if necessary.
Conclusion
Simply put, MATRAnet's M>WebTouch version 2.0 is an exemplary
product worth considering for your call center. Without a doubt, it would
improve the customer-agent relationship through its tracking system and
its well-laid out interfaces. Furthermore, M>WebTouch 3.0 (see
sidebar) promises to improve on an already sound product.
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New Additions For M>WebTouch
3.0
TMC� Labs recently had a chance to preview M>WebTouch 3.0, which
should be released by the time this review goes to press. If you already
own M>WebTouch 2.0, MATRAnet will upgrade it to 3.0 for no charge. In
our preview, we noticed cleaner graphical interfaces, especially the new
floatable chat window. We also noticed the nice addition of providing
back, forward and refresh buttons for the back-office window.
There are a number of other features added to M>WebTouch 3.0. There
is now support for a greater number of databases, including Oracle. The
Linux platform will also be supported. Furthermore, the inclusion of XML
in addition to HTML will greatly enhance your coding schematics.
To improve the relationship between customers and agents, Web call
forwarding will be added so that another agent will be able to take a
request if the current agent either becomes too busy or cannot answer the
customer's questions. If needed, a request can also be escalated up to the
supervisor. If customers have trouble with a Java chat room because they
don't have the update or they are behind a firewall that interferes with
the chat, a live HTML chat will be added to the next release of M>WebTouch.
Perhaps the most interesting addition to M>WebTouch 3.0 is the
inclusion of collaborative browsing. When needed, a new browser comes up
so that pages can be shared or updated by both the customer and the agent.
This will certainly make for better customer/agent collaboration.
Finally, MATRAnet has dedicated a great deal of time and effort into
making M>WebTouch a multilingual product and already has a large list
of languages with which it works. In the next release, HTML pages can be
set up and modified in these different languages.
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