Do Not Reply: the Web Customer Service Mantra?

Perhaps it is simply that companies are failing to understand expectations for customer service in the internet world.

A recent survey of e-mail response times showed the average response took an incredible 46 hours, and had deteriorated by 40% since 2006. Response times this long leave customers with little option but to resort to picking up the phone, a process not much loved by consumers when it almost inevitably means dealing with the universally disliked “off-shore call centre” or possibly worse, the inappropriately named “interactive voice recognition system”. Indeed, a YouGov survey recently identified that only 4% of people have a good experience dealing with call centres.

So the web really ought to be the answer: easier for customers to use than call centres; cheaper for companies to service. But for far too many sites, it is failing to deliver the levels of customer satisfaction it ought to.

BroadVision’s assessment methodology rates web sites on 5 criteria: advice, user control, content, transaction and support. We regularly find that it is the post-sale support dimension where sites score most poorly. Interestingly, it is also the area where there is the largest variance between a company’s own opinion of their capability, and the methodology’s rating.

The problem, perhaps, is that in too many cases eCommerce web sites seem to treat the checkout process as the end of the relationship with the customer. It is, of course, the beginning. Satisfied customers will return again and again; dissatisfied customers will steer well clear in the future and are often willing to pay a higher price for the same product if they feel they will receive better service.

So how do we reach this utopian vision of high-quality, web-based customer service? At the core of the answer is personalization. Too often dismissed as purely for pre-sale “you bought that so you might want this” style cross-selling, personalization has just as much value in the post-sales relationship.

BroadVision were the pioneer of web-based personalization back at the start of the first internet gold-rush. But after the dot com bubble burst, personalization became something of a dirty word – to many companies it’s failed promise became synonymous with the worst excesses of the over-spending on technology during the bubble; to consumers it was seen as an invitation to marketers to misuse their personal information.

These fears are mostly unfounded. Yes, of course it’s possible to waste a huge amount of money on inappropriate personalization strategy, and to abuse consumer trust. But just because you can do something badly doesn’t mean you can’t do it well.

Over the last year or two, personalization has been enjoying a renaissance. Google & Yahoo offer increasingly personalized home pages for users; BBC and New York Times are delivering personalized news feeds; Amazon continue to use customer purchase histories skilfully recommend relevant products. But perhaps the biggest driver in a change of consumer perception about sharing details about themselves are the social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. The information these sites hold about people is a marketer’s dream. But as they become more commercialized, social networks have to take care how they use this information.

The Facebook Beacon fiasco is a perfect example of this. Although since revised, the system initially allowed activity on partner sites to be tracked and reported back to your Facebook profile, but didn’t tell users it was doing this, and gave no way of opting out. As one commentator noted at the time, “a privacy disaster waiting to happen”.

It is exactly this sort of abuse of trust that perpetuates customer concerns about personalization. But trust is a fickle thing – how many of those people concerned about giving an online retailer their profile details have no problem at all holding a supermarket loyalty card or airline frequent flyer card. They may still have concerns about sharing their information with these companies, but these concerns are outweighed by the prospect of free flights and money-off vouchers. No one likes to admit it, but trust can be bought. Every man has his price.

So the first step in a successful personalization strategy is not to ask “what information would I like to collect?” It should be “why will my customers want to trust me with their details?” Put simply, the customer will ask “what’s in it for me?” For post-sales customer service, the answer to this is fairly simple – by providing a retailer or manufacturer with details of the products you have bought, they can provide you with relevant support and service information for those products. And yes, that might include recommending appropriate accessories or supplies. If you’ve bought a printer, you’re going to need paper and ink for it on a regular basis. Pre- and post-sale personalization need not be entirely separate from each other.

What irritates us all is being required to repeat information that we have already provided. The classic example of this comes from the world of phone-based customer service. When calling a certain mobile phone operator, the automated response system asked you to type in your phone number. Then, when you were put through to the call centre agent, what was the first question they asked? “What’s your phone number?” This annoys the customer before they’ve even said a word.

The equivalent in the internet world is the “do not reply” e-mail. Order confirmation e-mails from many major eCommerce sites are sent from an address like do_not_reply@company.com. Why shouldn’t I reply? Surely, if I have a query about an order, the easiest way for me to do it is to simply reply to the order confirmation. What’s more, it will have all the information that the customer service agent is going to need to process the enquiry – my name, e-mail address, order number, date of purchase and a list of items purchased. Instead, the customer is often sent to the web site to log in, find the relevant order, and hope that the type of enquiry they want to make fits one of the pre-defined templates the site knows how to handle.

Maybe this sort of approach makes it easier for the customer service department to handle enquiries, but at what expense to customer ease of use?

Even more bizarre is the use of “do not reply” addresses for marketing e-mails, which effectively say “here are some products we would like you to buy from us… but please don’t ask us if you want more information”.

What both the “do not reply” and “what’s your phone number” examples show is the failure to make use of information already provided. The technical architect of a major telecoms site once remarked to me “we don’t do much personalization”. I was bemused by this, because his site provided customers better ability to manage their account online than any of their competitors. Personalized customer service is not a question of constantly upselling other products – it is merely intelligently using the information you already have about a customer to provide context to the questions they ask or actions they perform.

Of course, the first thing on the mind of a customer which they click the “confirm order” button is unlikely to be “what happens if the product goes wrong”. They are unlikely to go through a complicated registration process there and then. So make it simple – what information beyond that collected during the checkout do you really need to provide customer service? Just a password to be able to access the account again.

While the advantages of personalized customer service for retailers are clear enough, the benefits for manufacturers are even greater. Many manufacturers sell primarily through retailers so have no direct contact with the customer. Yes, we’ve all seen the warranty registration card in the box, but who ever fills those in? The web gives them an opportunity to build such a relationship, but only if they can answer the “what’s in it for me?” question. This ought not to be difficult – to give a recent personal example that I am sure many people can relate to, “tell me who in my local area can fix my washing machine, and get the relevant parts for it”.

So how good is your web customer service? Where relevant, does your web site:

1. Allow customers to register quickly and easily after completing a purchase?
2. Send order confirmation e-mails from a “real” e-mail address?
3. Allow customers to log in and check the status of open orders?
4. Allow customers to view their order history?
5. Allow customers to initiate product returns online?
6. Provide a knowledge base of frequently asked customer service questions?
7. Provide input forms for asking questions not covered by the FAQ?
8. Provide e-mail and telephone contact information for those customers who want to talk a real person?
9. Provide product support information and documentation for purchased items?
10. Product localized servicing information for purchased items?
11. Offer the customer the option of receiving e-mail alerts about any product updates or service information?
12. Offer relevant accessories for purchased items?

It is this sort of capability that is defining high quality customer service in an internet-enabled world. It is not just using the web to answer the same questions that used to be asked in an offline world. The internet has raised consumer expectations about the quality and speed of service. Is your customer service department adequately equipped to handle this?

This article was written by Richard Hughes, Technical Director at BroadVision.