Web Merchants Offer Service With an E-Smile

Maybe it’s just because it’s August, and the heat is making me ornery. Or maybe it’s because I’m just plain envious.

But I’m starting to get a little bit peeved at all of the effort e-tailers are making to cater to the customer service needs of e-shoppers.

Not that I begrudge cyber shoppers the right to access a live, real-time customer-service human being with the click of a mouse. It’s just that there are times during my land-based shopping stints when I can’t seem to access a live, real-time customer-service human being with a 10-man search team using maps.

Anyone who’s followed the growth of e-commerce knows that customer service--or the lack thereof--appeared as one of the greatest threats to e-com growth. In response, cyber merchants are investing in a basketful of high- and low-tech customer-service solutions to try to cut down on the number of abandoned shopping carts littering the aisles of the local cyber mall.

But what about those of us stuck in line at the local brick-and-mortar mall? Or the grocery store? Or calling on the phone to our insurance companies? We have no mouse, but we have needs.

And there are more of us. Even the cyber experts concede that we, not the e-com converts, still represent the 400-pound gorilla. The most recent figures from Cambridge-based Forrester Research indicate that about a third of all U.S. households will buy something online this year, spending an estimated $38.8 billion. And even though that’s up from only 5% and $2.9 billion in 1997, it still leaves 66% of us waiting in a nonmoving line at a checkout counter.

Analyst Patricia B. Seybold of the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston says most investors concede that e-tailing will never outstrip conventional retailing or even gain more than a 10% market share.

So why all of the catering and kowtowing? Well, for starters, 10% of a $5-trillion worldwide retail market is a really big number.

Plus, e-selling is the latest “big new thing.”

It’s the same phenomenon that occurs when someone walks into the room with a new baby. There’s a stampede to the right, to gaze adoringly upon that cherubic little face, while a few feet to the left, the older child stands with his hair on fire.

Sooner or later someone will ask, “What’s that burning smell,” but in the battle for attention the new kid almost always wins out.

So, on behalf of all of the older children with singed hair and suffering shoppers who’ve never ventured into cyberspace, let me offer the merchants, salespeople and telephone answerers of the world a bit of advice: Don’t neglect us; we’re starting to get really steamed about it.

“I think that in the past three or four years, customer service in the brick-and-mortar stores has been suffering,” said Julie Schoenfeld, who until June was president and chief executive of North Hollywood-based Net Effect Systems Inc. The company offers a service that allows businesses to add a live help desk to their Web presence.

“Have you been to a department store and tried to find a salesperson? I think, in general, the economy is so strong . . . that there just aren’t enough employees out there,” she said. “I think this is more of a labor shortage.”

Schoenfeld’s company was recently sold to search engine Ask Jeeves Inc. for more than $300 million, but she still has strong thoughts about customer service--or the lack thereof.

She’ll speak on the topic, especially as it relates to Web sites, at a conference on customer service management set for November in Orlando, Fla.

In some respects, Schoenfeld said, Internet sites have an advantage over land-based merchants because, with new technology, “You can actually lower the cost to deliver great service.

“In a brick-and-mortar environment, human beings are expensive and labor is short. On the Web, companies that have invested in technology can deliver great customer service at a lower cost.”

Bob Chatham, a Forrester analyst, said some companies are dabbling in systems that provide an automatic response quickly to e-mailed inquiries.

The latest buzz, he said, is voice-over-IP (Internet protocol), which allows Web shoppers to click a button and speak with a live customer service representative. The idea has promise, he said, but so far consumers are lukewarm.

With still other techno solutions, including streaming video feeds, still on the drawing board, Chatham said the cyber merchants are in part trying to play catch-up.

“E-tailers originally approached customer service as the last thing they needed to do to be successful,” Chatham said. “That’s coming back to bite them. So this is really a reactive response to some pretty awful customer service.”

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In the spirit of enlightenment, I’d like to encourage more land-based businesses to make a reactive response to some pretty awful customer service.

And in the spirit of cooperation, I’d like to offer a few suggestions:

* If your store is going to be open on a given day, you might want to actually have some sales clerks working. It makes it easier for the customer to tell the difference between being abandoned and being ignored.

* The phrase “So do you want this or what?” should be stricken from the lexicon of anyone who wants to still be employed at the end of the day.

* I’m sure your salesclerk is very distressed about the fact that her significant other came home at 3 a.m., after leaving at noon to get ice cream. But if you don’t mind, perhaps she can discuss this with her friend on the phone after she’s rung up my order?

* At the local burger joint, please don’t let my order get cold while you discuss with your co-worker what each of you is going to do when you get off work in three hours. Especially if I’m not invited to come along.

* Schedule at least one training session a month to teach people who answer the telephone what your company is, what you sell, what your hours are, and where you’re located. Trust me when I tell you that they don’t know.

* Schedule at least one training session a month to teach people who answer the telephone the difference between hold and disconnect. I always seem to get people who get those two confused, and it’s always after I’ve been transferred at least five times.

* If you put someone on the phone to give directions, make sure they don’t send your customers to New Zealand instead. You won’t get the sale, and it makes the customers mad because they will have wasted all that gas.

* Try to avoid sending your callers into phone-tree hell, that telephonic purgatory where you’re forced to press an endless string of numerals on your touch-tone keypad, only to end up on the voicemail of some guy named Sid in accounts payable who’s on vacation until next Thursday.

* Don’t make your customers fight to the death to have charges removed from a bill for goods or services that they never bought. It makes them ornery, especially in the August heat.

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Valley@Work runs each Tuesday. Karen Robinson-Jacobs can be reached at Karen.Robinson@latimes.com.