E-Shoppers Go in Search of Service With a :)
The recent holiday shopping boom on the Internet left many online retailers unprepared to handle the enormous volume of e-mailed customer service requests, raising questions about this new industry’s ability to give shoppers the level of service they’re used to in stores.
As electronic commerce continues to mature, experts say, customer service will become the next battleground. Online retailers will have to overcome their lack of direct contact with shoppers, not to mention the computer industry’s reputation for lousy customer service.
But so far only the leading online retailers have implemented efficient customer support systems. And this Christmas, even the leaders had trouble keeping up.
Normally, video retailer Reel.com responds to e-mail within 12 hours, a threshold the vast majority of Web sites don’t even attempt. But even with a 60-member customer service team answering both telephone calls and e-mails and running 24-hour shifts during peak selling periods, it took up to 48 hours to respond to some e-mails.
In the Internet world, responding to an e-mail within two days is considered a respectable standard, but leading online retailers are trying to raise the bar because they know that in the real world customers expect better.
The larger online retailers also offer customer service via phone, but in general, e-commerce sites steer customers’ questions to e-mail or information on their Web pages.
“We’ve got a long way to go as an industry on customer service,” said Julie Wainwright, president and chief executive of Emeryville, Calif.-based Reel.com.
That sentiment was underscored by a study performed prior to the holiday crush by research firm Jupiter Communications, which found that 42% of the top-ranked Web sites either took longer than five days to reply to customer e-mail inquiries, never replied or were not accessible by e-mail. While retailers did best among the 125 Web sites studied, nearly half of them took longer than a day to respond to e-mail, Jupiter found.
Increased holiday sales, which analysts say were triple the volume of last year, brought increased customer service requests, which are only now beginning to tail off as customers have returned gifts, spent cash gifts, redeemed gift certificates and gone online for the first time with personal computers they received as presents.
The ease of sending e-mail often leads to more customer service requests than a telephone-only help center would get. And under some circumstances, replying to e-mail can be more expensive than answering calls since companies have to find people with strong writing and typing skills.
Companies such as Kana Communications Inc., EGain Communications Corp., Ask Jeeves Inc. and Brightware Inc. have introduced technologies to reduce e-mail handling costs, manage and track the flow of e-mail requests and give consumers the ability to help themselves through Web sites.
E-mail routing software scans a customer’s plea for help, looking for key words and phrases that might indicate what kind of information the person is seeking, then sends the request to the appropriate person. Other systems then try to identify specifically what the person is asking and recommend possible answers to a customer service representative.
E-mail handling software keeps a record of all the contacts between the company and the customer and can provide a valuable pool of data for future marketing purposes, said Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing for EGain.
Some companies will go so far as to have the computer itself respond to the question, without any human intervention, although most companies are still anxious about giving up that control.
“The day that computer responses can mimic human responses, where the answer is as pertinent and personal, we will use it. But I haven’t seen it,” said Rick Hunt, vice president of electronic media at Total E, Columbia House’s music retailing Web site.
The problem isn’t necessarily that an auto-response e-mail system would send incorrect information, but that it would annoy an otherwise happy customer.
“A system might interpret an e-mail to say, ‘Please send me a catalog,’ when it was actually ‘Never send me a catalog again,’ ” said Mark Gainey, president and chief executive of Kana. “That will cost you more because either you’ll have to deal with more e-mail or, worse, it will escalate into a phone call.”
One problem companies face is that people writing e-mail are not always as clear and comprehensive as they are over the telephone, and a complicated request could result in several back-and-forth e-mails, making it time-consuming and expensive to the company and frustrating to the customer.
Also, e-mail often deals with multiple topics, making it difficult to handle automatically.
The answers to many, if not most, customer service e-mail questions can be found at the company’s Web site, but often the information is either too hard to find or people don’t want to take the time to look for it.
“Customers just want to say: ‘Look, I’ve done this; now what? You tell me,’ ” said Bob Trevor, director of customer service at online music retailer CDNow Inc., which saw its e-mail customer service requests peak during the holidays at 20,000 a week, overloading its systems.
Like its rival N2K Inc., CDNow’s most common customer service request concerns the status of an order, which can be answered through the company’s Web sites.
Ask Jeeves has developed a Web-based system, which it licenses to e-commerce sites such as Dell Computer Corp.’s, that tries to answer customers’ questions automatically. As customers ask questions, the system learns which ones it answers correctly and which ones need to be added to its database, improving the system over time.
Most online retailers see the flood of e-mail as a way of reaching customers who would not otherwise contact them, and the passive nature of the medium means customers will say things they would never say over the telephone or in person, particularly when it comes to complaints.
But often the retailers fail to provide good customer service at the most basic level, such as simply making an e-mail address or telephone number easy to find through the Web site.
“It’s critical, in order to maintain that good relationship with the customer, to make sure that you make it as easy as possible to contact and interact with you,” said Erina DuBois, electronic-commerce analyst with Dataquest. “And for most sites, it’s not.”
Times staff writer Jonathan Gaw can be reached via e-mail at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.
