Enhancing Online Customer Loyalty -- New Tools
And New Traps
BY LYN GUBSER, SIDEWARE
GartnerGroup research tells us that it costs up to 10 times more to
recapture a customer relationship than to maintain an existing one. We
also know that customer service increases the lifetime value of a customer
by escalating future sales through repeat visits. Just as with their
brick-and-mortar counterparts, it is imperative that e-businesses treat
their customers right, or they will go away, and they're not likely to
come back.
Conventional brick-and-mortar businesses rely on live customer service
representatives (CSRs) as well as technical support and help-desk
personnel to serve as primary contacts for their customers. Retail stores
such as Nordstrom's have actually built their businesses on the strategy
of championing customer service to acquire unparalleled customer loyalty.
But how can an online business ever attain Nordstrom's level of customer
satisfaction, repeat business and long-term customer profitability?
According to Forrester Research, the only e-businesses that are
thriving are those that provide quality online customer care. So what do
successful customer-oriented e-businesses look like? They are businesses
constantly searching for ways to achieve higher customer satisfaction and
retention, higher revenues per customer and lower costs for acquiring and
servicing customers. In short, they are building customer loyalty while at
the same time lowering labor costs by increasing the efficiency of their
CSRs. The most successful customer-oriented e-businesses are using the
full range of electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) solutions
to provide immediate communications and live customer care at every
customer touchpoint.
Technologies that provide online customer service include intelligent
e-mail, live collaborative chat, self-help, telephony, VoIP,
personalization and knowledge management solutions. Let's look at each of
these and see how they improve online service and thereby promote customer
loyalty.
E-mail
For more than 70 percent of online businesses, e-mail remains the only
means of online customer contact. The volume of mail, however, can be a
killer. Presently, nearly half of all e-mail responses from online
businesses arrive at least a week late. Many Web sites are so inundated
with e-mail that they no longer even post a customer service e-mail
address. But the situation is changing as artificial intelligence is being
applied to CRM. Today, simple and frequent questions can be answered by
computer without the customer ever knowing that the message was
computer-generated. So indistinguishable are some computer-generated
messages that they've created a new problem: unnecessary customer
thank-you messages that can clog an e-mail system!
Collaborative Chat
Do you have a question about a product? Finding it difficult to
understand a payment plan? Can't figure out exactly when an item will be
shipped? Click on a live customer service icon and up pops a chat box with
a cheerful "Hi! How may I help you today?" If you've shopped on
that Web site before, and you registered your user name when logging on,
you may even be addressed by name. The CSR with whom you are chatting
should have access to all databases and legacy systems that contain your
customer history, enabling such a response as, "Hi, Mrs. Smith. My
name is Ann. It's nice to see you once again shopping on our Web site. How
did the stereo work out that you purchased last month for your daughter's
birthday? I hope it was all you expected. How may I help you today?"
Now that is customer service. It's customer care that has not been seen
since the bygone days of the small town shopkeeper! Yet there are systems
that can link front-office solutions, including live chat, to back-office
databases and legacy systems, enabling CSRs to tap into a customer's
purchasing history, personal preferences, registered complaints or
problems or any other information the business possesses regarding a
particular customer. Knowing this information, the CSR can suggest new
products or accessories, provide valued-customer incentives, or otherwise
cross-sell and upsell to maximize revenue while enhancing customer
loyalty. The CSR can push to the online customer Web pages that feature
items of probable interest to the customer, or purchase forms that can be
completed online, help a customer compose a request for technical support,
or any number of other personal services. Such customer care can only
build loyalty between the online business and the satisfied customer.
Self-Help
Self-assistance has moved well beyond the days when frequently asked
questions (FAQs) were the only customer care available on an e-business
site. Today, self-help includes everything from intelligent FAQs, where
expert search systems can interpret a customer question to find an answer
that a key-word search might never locate, to virtual agents or
"bots" that chat with customers, answer questions and make
suggestions, nearly as effectively as a live person. Such bots are
equipped with a learning algorithm that enables them to improve the
accuracy of their responses with every customer contact they experience.
If they get stumped, they courteously hand the customer off to a live
agent. Depending on the e-business, virtual agents can normally handle
more than half of the questions asked by online customers.
Telephony
Computer-telephony integration, or CTI, is rapidly maturing as
intelligence has come to the software solutions that drive call centers.
Some Web pages are now equipped with callback buttons that, when clicked,
open a window in which the customer can leave a phone number where he or
she can be reached for questions or other services. Depending on the Web
page on which the callback button is imbedded, the request for a call can
be directed to a specific CSR who is intimately familiar with the goods
and services advertised on a particular Web page. The downside of this
technology is that few customers have a dedicated line for their
computers, so most have to get offline to receive a call. This brings up
another point solution, VoIP.
VoIP
For computers equipped with a microphone and soundcard, VoIP (voice over
Internet Protocol) can provide an outstanding customer care solution.
Click on a VoIP icon, and a live CSR speaks directly to you through
speakers or headphones. It's just like a telephone, but without the line
charges. Much as with live chat, a VoIP-equipped salesperson can push Web
pages to online customers to show new products or services while
conversing with the customer about their various attributes.
Alternatively, a CSR can talk a client through the process of filling out
a form or application.
Personalization
Some say that personalization is a strategy, not a software solution.
That's true if one looks at personalization as the process of linking
front- and back-offices so that CSRs have immediate access to customer
histories. But real personalization solutions are emerging - and because
they are personal, they are controversial. Such products might mine chat
text to determine a customer's personality predilections according to a
Myers-Briggs type of personality inventory. Do you have a "Type
A" personality and are shopping for a car online? A CSR may push you
toward a red sports car, rather than the beige sedan that would have been
suggested had your analyzed conversation revealed you to be a "Type
C." Is that ethical? Some would say no. But many customers are
willing to trade a little privacy for the convenience of not having their
time wasted by an agent showing them items in which they have no interest.
If the business keeps to themselves personal information about their
customers and never sells it, customer trust and loyalty are both
enhanced.
Knowledge Management
Think of knowledge management as the next level above self-help. Knowledge
management comprises those technologies that provide customers access to
critical internal and external information about a company's products and
services primarily for purposes of problem resolution. Knowledge
management tools include the popular "Ask Jeeves," which employs
algorithms that aid in information searches, to more sophisticated and
complex solutions that provide self-learning problem-resolution tools that
can be used by CSRs or external customers. Self-learning algorithms
greatly improve the value of knowledge management systems, but the system
can only learn to the degree that customers are willing to provide useful
feedback on the propriety of each response.
Many of today's eCRM vendors can help e-businesses communicate with
their customers, but most have focused exclusively on front-office
interaction, ignoring back-office resources where the real gold is to be
found. Most application service providers (ASPs), in fact, offer only
front-end solutions. But back-office technologies, especially artificial
intelligence, data and text mining, data source managers and API hooks,
constitute the real magic of eCRM. Without the ability to collaborate with
a company's legacy systems and databases, many front-end solutions are
only attractive traps for unwary e-businesses. They may look good on the
surface, but they can't provide CSRs the information they need to deliver
customer satisfaction and enhance customer loyalty. In the world of online
customer service, the message is clear: successful e-businesses must
"go for the gold."
Lyn Gubser, PhD, is executive director of research and training for Sideware
of Reston, Virginia. |