March 1999

M>WebTouch
MATRAnet
1172 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94040
P: 650-938-4986
F: 650-938-1887
Web: www.matranet.com

As the stock market's performance would suggest, it seems anything the Web touches turns to gold. E-mail, e-commerce, multimedia - these are all applications that promise to revolutionize not only the way we do business, but the very way we think about buying and selling. Take, for example, the buying and selling of books. It used to be that there were only a few places where you could go to really browse through millions of books: Foyles in London, perhaps the Strand in NYC if you didn't mind getting trampled. The specialty bookstores were always interesting too - with books only on art history, or chess, or American automobiles. And, of course, there were always university libraries.

Then along came the superstores, like Borders and Barnes and Noble, combining browsing with coffee and assorted multimedia offerings. Soon after came Amazon.com, then barnesandnoble.com, and browsing took on a new meaning. For better or for worse, wandering through the dusty stacks of the university library, or getting jostled and trampled by irate New Yorkers single-mindedly pursuing a cut-rate reviewer's copy of the latest best-seller, may be slowly becoming a thing of the past. Instead, millions of buyers are now browsing online, awed by the selection and convenience that can be had on the Web, but perhaps missing the "old way" just a bit.

Enter M>WebTouch - the e-commerce solution with "a human touch." M>WebTouch is a comprehensive e-commerce solution that allows a company to maximize its Web presence while simultaneously providing individualized service for any number of customers. Through its tracking and profiling capabilities, M>WebTouch allows your customer service representatives to provide a personalized response to your virtual customers, via e-mail or real-time chat, and there are plans to include VoIP and video over IP as these become more functional for average users.

Based upon in-house business rules, M>WebTouch monitors and records specific customers' browsing habits on your Web site and then provides this information to your service representatives if the potential customer requires personal attention. For example, you may stipulate in your business rules that certain customers - say, those interested in product group A, a more expensive or more confusing product line - deserve personal attention before customers looking at other products, such as those in group B or C. Or you might prioritize customers interested in group A so that they are able to initiate real-time chat with service representatives, whereas other users would be limited to e-mail interaction.

Additionally, M>WebTouch allows for proactive customer contact. For instance, you might decide that you want an agent to contact anyone who has been on product-related Web pages for more than five minutes. When this criterion is met, an agent will be able to initiate a chat or e-mail correspondence with the potential customer, perhaps clarifying something that was vague on the Web site, and hopefully convincing the customer that now is the time to buy.

While a person browsing the Web may be a bit surprised to receive e-mail or a chat request from a Web site, this is an accurate reproduction of the "real-life" browsing experience, with the salesperson who waits a few minutes and then approaches to ask, "May I help you with anything?" Potential customers should find this application both helpful and considerate. Also, M>WebTouch uses cookies to capture information about a Web site hit, so that the user can always choose to remain anonymous while on your site. Again, this provides a human touch, respecting a user's concerns about privacy.

It may be quite some time before real estate becomes less important than "Web estate" in the retail market. Perhaps the latter will never really replace the former, but rather the two will coexist in a healthy symbiosis. Regardless, a product like M>WebTouch is able to support the development of Web-based retail without resulting in a cold, impersonal site. Potential customers are clearly treated with a "human touch."