Imagine going to the mall, walking into a store and there is no one there to help you. What would you do? Chances are you are going to leave the store.
Today, websites sell everything from books, computers, vacations, insurance, real state and now even financial services. Yet almost all of them operate under the premise that everything is automated and that artificial intelligence replaces the need for human interaction. This is wrong. The problem is that over the Web, a visit-to-buy conversion rate is of 2% or less. That means more than two thirds of the websites in the world are so unsuccessful as sales tools that 49 out of every 50 visitors go away without buying anything.
This is a result of the bad Internet early stage development and tolerance of venture capitalist and investment bankers for bad execution or perhaps just simply growing pains of our new online economy. Any business in the “real world” that was so bad at converting foot traffic into customers would be out of business in a month.
Some companies introducing their products and services online seem to forget that although they can automate many processes, they are still interacting with human beings. They must not forget that every visitor to their website is a unique person with special needs to be addressed – the same as in any traditional setting.
According to Forrester Research, two-thirds of all online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Boredom, unclear instructions and tool malfunctions are just a few of the e-tail site headaches that drive online shoppers away. Forrester says sites take an average of 28 hours to respond to customer inquiries, while Jupiter Communications reports that almost half of the 125 e-tail outlets don’t respond at all or take five days or more to reply. A survey found that 35% of Internet shoppers said that they would be willing to spend more money online if they could speak to a customer service representative before making a purchase. And for those who have never bought anything online, 14% said they would be willing to buy online if a live customer representative were present to help them at their crucial point of purchase.
So what do you think e-business should do? Precisely like in any other business this is a problem or early-stage development issue in our new online world economy. If e-businesses refuse to provide online live support to website visitors, it is a fact that they will be likely losing customers. Remember a toll-free phone call often won’t do the trick because the typical customer has only one home phone line and he is using it to access the Web and won’t likely log off the Internet to call for help. And trying to e-mail questions or concerns for feedback only leads to further frustration. Consumers who shop online want instant gratification – they answers right away, at their crucial point of purchase.
So much money has been swilling around Internet businesses that companies have lost sight of customer needs. But this failure is finding its solution in companies that can now provide the tools to improve their visit to buy conversion rate. Startcall.com and other application service providers offer online live support tools that allow real-time communication over the Internet. The tools available range from text chat to page pushing, Voice over IP (VoIP), shared browsing, call-back technology, or a combination of these. Several vendors offer these tools as hosted services, for which business or organizations pay a monthly fee, and add a few lines of HTML to the code for a website.
Text chat and page pushing technology allow customers to contact a company in real time via text-chat software. Customers who need a question answered can just click on a text-chat button and a screen pops up requesting the customer’s name, to help personalize the communication. A customer service representative greets the customer and the two-way text-chat dialog begins as both parties take turns typing text online. Because the text-chat sessions are conducted over a secure connection, e-buyers and Web businesses can enter confidential information without any fear of the information being hijacked.
Another technology, called page-pushing, enables customer service representatives to share information with customers over the Web – including Web pages, forms or applications – while conducting a voice conversation or text chat, using nothing more than a common Web browser. They can deliver answers to specific questions backed up with real-time Web pages. Customer service representative can walk their clients through the completion of Web-based forms. They can also assist them in solving difficult technical problems and provide live sales presentations. In short, this technology lets business sales forces provide their customers with more effective, personalized assistance that will leave competition in the dust. At the end of the session, the e-buyer can have a record of the conversation in the form of an e-mail, or a print out or both. This is especially useful in a technical support environment so the customer doesn’t “forget” the conversation and has detailed instructions in writing at his/her disposal.
Voice over IP
With voice over IP engines, customers can literally speak to support reps without a telephone. As with text chat solutions, the leading VoIP engines are hosted services and, to integrate this tool to your web site, simply required you to add a few lines of code.
Interactive voice solutions are very easy to use and provide e-commerce based companies the opportunity to increase online sales by giving visitors to their site this new ability to communicate and get questions answered at their crucial point of purchase. When a visitor to your web site clicks on your Internet Voice Buttons, placed by one of these vendor’s programmers on your web site, a small voice client plug in auto-installs into the customer’s browser. Through that a client users can have verbal conversation with a customer service representative. This service connects consumers instantly and directly from their PC to a customer service representative’s regular office phone.
This unique service allows a company to deliver the ultimate online customer service, the “human Voice” and turn curious visitors possibly into instant customers.
According to a study done by Harris Interactive survey 91,332 online users in the fourth quarter of 1999 through its ongoing tracking survey, ecommercepulse.ä
Who is using customer service?
· More than one in five online shoppers – nearly 16,000,000 individuals – contacted customer service representative at least once each month during the fourth quarter 1999. These shoppers in general have higher households incomes, are slightly older, have been online longer and are much more likely to be shopping from home than from work.
Why does customer service matter?
· Those who try to contact online live customer service spend, on average, more than three times as much as those who do not.· During fourth quarter 1999, those who contacted an online live customer service representative spent an average of $232 million in a given month, compared with $67 million for those who did not use customer service.
Eventually we will use the Internet to do a lot of our shopping, or at least a lot of our research before committing to buying a product or a service. You can now even apply for loans and online mortgage bankers have become bullish about adding the ability to respond to customer queries in real time.
As e-commerce explodes to an estimated $1 trillion within the next decade, analysts predict that the quality of online customer service will determine whether a consumer shops at your site or surfs to another.
Antonio Treminio is president and CEO of Startcall.com.