Hello, May I Help You?
May 22 2000
The Web is often like a mall after closing time - plenty of things to buy, but no clerks to assist you.
While most people hate a hard sell, many appreciate having their hands held as they virtually kick the tires of a new car or peer into a fitting room mirror. Indeed, a bit of guidance can be nice if you're paralyzed with indecision about which sweater to buy when all of them look equally appealing on your screen. The name of the game is online customer service - although for most sites, this is easier said than done.
E-mail and instant messaging attempt to answer many shoppers' requests for help, but with lackluster results: slow turnaround and canned replies, and sometimes no response at all. [See "Customer Disservice," May 19, 1999.]
A handful of companies are looking toa more personal mode of interaction to meet the demands of discriminate shoppers: a warm, friendly and, most important, human "May I help you?" coming from their computer speakers.
The logic, of course, is that the more personal attention shoppers get, the more likely they are to buy something and come back for more. According to a Yankelovich Partners study, 63 percent of Web surfers will not buy anything online until they feel they've had adequate human interaction. Even more specifically, Forrester Research reports that 66 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned for service-related reasons.
"People are accustomed to using their voice when they shop," says Matt Jones, president and CEO of Cupertino, Calif.-based Lipstream Networks. "When they go on the Web and that's taken away, customers feel like they're losing something. And if you're considering the purchase of jewelry, or a car, or [technology stock], your questions aren't as easily put into text."
To talk the talk, visit online jeweler Miadora.com, a site that integrates Lipstream's Live Voice technology. Click the Voice button in the Client Services menu and you can chat with a customer-service representative about the virtues of vintage watches. There's simply no such thing as a silly question when you're wavering between a Rolex and an Omega.
"Within the luxury categories, one of the things that's been beneficial to shoppers has been the anonymity" of the online experience, says Alex Viteri, a Miadora representative. "You're no longer intimidated by going into a jewelry store. But we still have to be able to give you all the information you need."
HEARD IT ALL BEFORE
When a speaker talks into her microphone, the words travel over a high-speed network to the voice service provider's high-performance servers, and then back out to the listeners. Such complicated routing often results in poor sound quality. But when you're gabbing with cyberpals without running up a long-distance bill, you're more willing to deal with AM radio-quality audio than when you're just one query away from a big purchase.
So with its checkered past, is voice over the Internet finally ready for prime time for e-commerce? "Is it as good quality on a 28.8Kbps connection as a regular phone conversation? No, but it's 90 percent of the way there," says Jeremy Verba, COO and president of Mountain View, Calif.-based HearMe. "And when you're on a 56Kbps connection, you bet it's as good as a telephone call."
The technology is the latest must-have offering for customer-service vendors, which are buying it and then reselling it as part of larger packages. Lipstream's voice technology is now part of electronic customer relationship management, or ECRM, services from the likes of eShare Technologies, Kana Communications, PeopleSupport and Quintus, among other resellers that provide outsourced e-mail management for numerous sites. [See "At Your Service," May 19, 1999.]
"We embed our live voice services within the ECRM applications so they can provide a broader suite for the full customer service you're used to in the real world," says Jones, who counts investors American Express and Compaq as users.
But at this point, American Express is more of a beta tester than a committed client. American Express' 90-day pilot program for voice over the Net began earlier this month with promising results, says Jeff Fleischman, VP of risk and re-engineering. Currently, select pages on the American Express Online Services site are enabled with a Talk button. Depending on the success of the pilot, applicants for American Express products may eventually be able to help their approval chances by answering follow-up questions as they apply; cardholders will more easily be able to voice their concerns as they view their account information online.
"For our customer-service representatives, it's effective because it's a 'nonphone-call phone call,'" Fleischman says. "Before, if customers had to resolve an online issue but had only one phone, they would have to go offline. From the customer's point of view, it's a more productive session now. From our point of view, we're able to be more proactive."
Meanwhile, application service provider FaceTime Communications in Foster City, Calif., announced in March that it will resell HearMe's VoiceNetwork as part of FaceTime's Instant Customer suite. FaceTime's clients would be charged 10 cents to 25 cents a minute, depending on the number of minutes that are bundled into a contract. David Hsieh, FaceTime's cofounder and VP of business affairs, says he's confident that the price is justifiable for many of his customers. But it's not likely to knock out text-based methods of online customer service anytime soon.
"Right now we're in early adopter mode," Hsieh says. "You can't really take your least educated consumers and expect them to have an easy experience. There's too much out of your control. They may complain that they can't hear you, but you don't even know if their computers are hooked up correctly."
DOWN THE LINE
"An e-commerce site that already has people staffing 1-800 lines can use the same people to talk to consumers online," essentially covering two customer-service channels with one call center, says HearMe's Verba.
And the consumer benefits are similar. "You can still talk to a live person even if you don't have two phone lines in your house," says Viteri of Miadora, a customer of HearMe's competitor, Lipstream.
"Consumers want seamless shopping experiences, and voice can help them get that," Verba says. "I think all of this is really going a long way toward ending the retailer's dilemma of the abandoned shopping cart."
CARE AND HAND-HOLDING
Customer service isn't cheap. Here's a rundown of the types of costs for the average online retailer:
SOURCE: BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP