InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

November 16, 1998

Web Service: Ready Or Not

Businesses brace for a sharp increase in online buying. Service and support will be the keys to success.

By Justin Hibbard

he approaching holiday season will be the busiest yet for doing business on the Web. By one estimate, online vendors will ring up $2.3 billion in sales during this peak shopping period, more than twice last year's level. But will their service measure up to customers' expectations?

About 43% of PC users in the United States will shop on the Internet this holiday season, according to a study released last week by Dell Computer and Louis Harris & Associates Inc. That's a big jump from just 10% last year. For many consumers, online shopping will be a first-time experience, and initial impressions will count.

"If customer support is not there, people will try the site once and never come back," warns Sharon Solfest, manager of interactive distribution with Northwest Airlines Corp., which expects a surge in E-mail from holiday travelers. In an effort to be ready, Northwest this week will deploy an E-mail routing and tracking system from Kana Communications.

Web merchants have their work cut out for them. A new study by Jupiter Communications finds that many companies have a hard time simply responding to E-mail inquiries that come in over the Web. Of 125 E-commerce sites visited by Jupiter, 42% took more than five days to respond, didn't respond at all, or listed no E-mail address. Companies "just haven't taken the right approach to the Internet yet," says Ken Allard, a Jupiter analyst. "To not respond to a user-initiated one-to-one relationship is unforgivable."

Bad service gets noticed. Online retailer Shopping.com has been the subject of 138 customer complaints, according to the Better Business Bureau of Southern California. Angry customers have placed dozens of postings on the Net complaining that E-mails go unanswered and that the company's phone lines are constantly busy.

Things should get better. Jupiter found that 77% of consumer Web sites plan to increase investment in customer-service technology and processes next year. Jupiter expects up to 90% of sites in high-service categories such as travel, retail, and financial services to be able to respond to questions within one business day by mid-1999.

The fast-growing category of Web-based customer-care products will help. One example: Inference Corp. last week introduced a suite of products that extend its call-center tools to E-mail, chat, the Web, and interactive voice-response systems.

Companies are snapping up these products. Dell this week will add an automatic question-answering system from Ask Jeeves Inc. to its Web site. The system will be put to use as the PC maker launches an advertising campaign to draw attention to its site. 1-800-Flowers Inc. last week signed an agreement to add an IP telephony application from IDT Corp. to its Web site, allowing its call-center agents to talk with customers while online. And Cendant Corp., a $5 billion services company in Parsippany, N.J., deployed Kana's E-mail routing software last month in anticipation of the holiday traffic.

Cendant was caught by surprise at this time last year, when traffic on the company's NetMarket Web site doubled and traffic on its four America Online sites quadrupled.Cendant normally answers 90% of E-mail inquiries the day they arrive, but when traffic peaked last November, it couldn't keep up. The company didn't reach its 90% goal again until March. "We learned a lot," says Kerry O'Neill, the company's VP of interactive services.

The No. 1 lesson was the importance of good forecasting. "Understand what drives people to contact you," O'Neill says. Cendant now uses Excel spreadsheets to create models that predict surges in online customer-service requests. The company looks at historical data about the number of unique visitors to its Web sites, the number of members logged on to AOL, the number of orders placed by customers, and the number of service requests. Cendant uses the data to determine the level of staffing it will need.

Cendant also deployed Kana's Customer Messaging System. The application processes incoming E-mail, routes messages to appropriate service representatives, and queues unanswered messages. Reps can consult a knowledge base of answers and pre-written responses, while reporting tools let the company monitor E-mail activity. The application has helped Cendant representatives answer 50% more E-mail messages. Next quarter, the company intends to configure the application to generate automatic E-mail responses to commonly asked questions.

When Northwest Airlines started testing Kana's software in July, its customer-relations department had a three-week backlog of E-mail messages. By the end of the test last week, the department was responding to 90% of E-mail within three to four days. The company's ultimate goal: to answer all E-mail queries within four hours.

This week, Northwest is putting the Kana software into production in its online support center, whose 12 full-time employees answer customer questions via phone and E-mail. Questions range from the mundane to the unpredictable: One passenger sent E-mail asking if he could bring a canoe as luggage (The answer: no.)

Apparel retailer J. Crew Inc., which just upgraded its Web site with four Sun Microsystems Enterprise 5500 servers in anticipation of holiday traffic, has built its own application for managing E-mail. The system reformats messages and drops them into a newsgroup on a Netscape News Server on the company's intranet. Service reps use newsreader clients to view and respond to the messages, while other employees, such as clothing designers, can read the messages to see what customers are saying. "It's a simple mechanism that allows a number of people to get in and use the same mailbox at the same time," says Marc Hansen, VP of systems architecture at J. Crew.

Immediate Answers
Some online shoppers can't wait hours for answers. Customers of 1-800-Flowers often want same-day or next-day delivery. So the online florist last week signed an agreement to add the IDT Click2Talk application to its Web site. The software will let customers converse with a sales agent verbally, with the voice traffic traveling over the Net. For customers without audio-equipped PCs, 1-800-Flowers last month started using NetAgent, a chat application from eShare Inc. "We've seen a decrease in E-mail by 25%," says Donna Iucolano, VP of interactive services at 1-800-Flowers.

At barnesandnoble.com Inc., when a customer submits an order, the site automatically generates a response acknowledging that order. Orders are sent to distributors' warehouse systems in five-minute increments, and customers receive a second message when the order is shipped. Barnesandnoble.com can take an order in the morning, ship a book in the afternoon, and deliver it the next day. "We view customer service as absolutely critical," says John Kristie, VP of IT at barnesandnoble.com. "As soon as someone entrusts us with their credit-card number, it's incumbent on us to make sure they feel happy every step of the way."

Different Approaches
New products appear each week. The core of Inference's new product is a case-based reasoning engine that analyzes customer questions and prompts customers with more questions until it finds the best answer in a database of canned responses.

In its forthcoming k-Commerce suite, Inference will integrate its reasoning engine with e-Share's chat system to let call-center agents interact with customers online. Inference also plans to integrate its engine with an interactive voice-response system from Periphonics Corp. so customers can get answers via touch-tone phone, as well as with Kana's Customer Messaging System.

Dell is preparing to launch an app that uses Ask Jeeves' reasoning engine. Dell has pulled answers to frequently asked questions from 50,000 pages of technical support information on its Web site and loaded them into Ask Jeeves' repository. Users will enter questions in a Web form, and Ask Jeeves will refine the question until it finds the right answer. The application will supplement Dell's phone and E-mail support channels, says Bob Langer, director of Dell Online.

Other vendors with integrated packages for Internet customer service are Acuity Corp. and NetPerceptions Inc. "With all the numerous technology components, the market is starved for more integrated approaches," says Allen Bonde, an analyst at Extraprise Group. Other recently released products include Brightware Inc.'s Brightware 3 and an upgrade to Aptex Software Inc.'s SelectResponse (see story). The Aptex product uses artificial intelligence to process E-mail and then respond from a stockpile of prepared messages.

Mark Hansen, CEO of Kinderhook Systems, a systems integrator that helped AT&T WorldNet build its Web support operation, says E-commerce will force Web service centers to become more sophisticated. AT&T WorldNet, which gets nearly 10,000 E-mail messages a day, has begun balancing the workload by redistributing E-mail among multiple sites. Next, AT&T wants to support foreign languages. But Hansen says few companies are that far along. "Most," he says, "are just beginning."

With additional reporting by Clinton Wilder

Back to This Week's Issue

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page