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Customer Relations for E-Commerce
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Paul May |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In the fast-moving world of e-commerce, customer support and fulfillment are crucial functions of any effective enterprise. In this essay, business-technology consultant Paul May outlines the problems and the potential of integrating into an existing organization these essential aspects of business-to-consumer relations. |
 usiness-to-consumer ecommerce has a profound, and often unsettling, effect on organizations that embrace it. A business that has previously prided itself on being customer-facing suddenly becomes customer-driven on a real-time basis. The distinction between sales and nonsales functions begins to blur because an obvious human or physical layer is no longer tasked with enacting the customer interface. |
At the same time the business discovers that reach is a bidirectional phenomenon: the enterprise extends a welcoming hand to its customers, but those customers grasp the hand and start to climb into the organization, operating whatever levers they can find inside. |
Customer communications
The most obvious symptom of this effect is that traditional forms of customer communication and, especially, telephone calls do not diminish as online fact-finding, ordering, and status-tracking are rolled out. The nature of the inbound queries changes, with the proportion of nonroutine requests growing as routine transactions migrate to the automated channel. |
Customers call after absorbing your product information and that of your competitors. They are better informed about their options and about your company's capabilities than they previously were. They may, therefore, see themselves as holding greater negotiating power. |
These are, of course, good problems to have. If a company's human communications channels become taken up with discussions only humans can have--while automated channels take care of routine business--then the company is starting to make the best use of its capabilities. Difficulties can arise when responsibility for managing dialogue in the ecommerce channel is mislocated in the organization. |
Most commercial Websites grew from marketing department initiatives. Brochures, annual reports, and press releases take comfortably to the Web, and an increasing amount of supplier research is now conducted in this way. The presentational and news values of the Web in its publishing aspect have a natural fit with the competencies and goals of the marketing department. And, for many companies, the establishment of a systems-mediated service that calls for little intervention from the MIS department is a triumph for local autonomy and user power. |
As the Web presence develops into an ecommerce channel, the presentational and news values of the site do not diminish, but they are augmented by dialog. The reader bites back and votes with his mouse. The user's comments must be taken seriously and some of his votes translate directly into sales. Where are inbound queries to be directed? Lack of responsiveness to customer requests, whether initiated through email or Web forms, is one of the leading customer complaints in ecommerce. |
Filters and forms
Two common ways exist in which inbound communications can be successfully fielded. The first approach uses filters to categorize queries and then to prepare automated replies or to route the original email to a selected agent for response. Often a site does both, so an automated acknowledgment is generated. This acknowledgment includes a note about to which email address the original query has been forwarded and, sometimes, a guideline as to how long the reply will take to formulate. Site designers try to train users to channel their queries in a helpful manner, typically setting up email aliases for sales@company.com and info@company.com. These aliases resolve to group lists of agents or cause entries to be added to a queue in a job-management system. |
The second approach is to impose further structuring on inbound queries by restricting all dialogue to forms. Customers can be forced to specify a category for their communication from a drop-down list, which is often populated from analysis of inbound emails received prior to the forms strategy. |
The efficacy of this approach is contested throughout the industry. Some users claim customers do not like filling in lengthy forms and imparting demographic information. They also claim many customers will not contact a company unless there is a prominent email address to use. Others claim most customers find forms helpful and many do not want to compose their own emails. |
Wise organizations tend to offer email and forms-based routes together. If the company is going to use human agents to compose replies, it is also worth investing in a relevant support system for the authors. This may include blocks of reusable text, prechecked legal statements, and guidance on greetings. More sophisticated support systems include methods for embedding URLs of relevant offers or information sources, and analysis of the success rates of various message texts, as measured by subsequent responses. That the themes of customer learning and personalization crop up here should be no surprise. Customer-generated dialogue is too valuable to ignore. |
Where an organization is successful in building inbound traffic, it may want to consider creating characters to act as correspondents. This can be a way of standardizing the communications approach of a varying team of agents, so they all appear to sing from the same score. Where an organization owns a well-known character, this is a perfect opportunity to add a new dimension to its existence. On the other hand, many organizations find inbound email is the perfect opportunity to exercise a little honest humanity and may outsource response services to trained writers. |
The modes of human communication demanded by business-to-consumer ecommerce are, therefore, somewhat different from those traditionally used in the marketing department. The audience has fragmented, although it may be found to coalesce into a number of new categories as the volume of inbound communications grows. Where email communications can be economically shifted to the phone, then the call center is the obvious center of expertise for managing the customer dialog. Where the dialog remains text-based, companies need to consider creating "e-centers" (probably virtual ones), where agent-authors take responsibility for the satisfaction of queries and development of the organization's understanding of its customers. |
Fulfillment impact
Just like customer service, fulfillment is an aspect of the organization's responsibilities that is traditionally seen as a discrete and nonintegrated department. Ecommerce bathes fulfillment in a new light. When goods and services can be ordered directly by the customer, no obvious reason exists why there should be a disconnect between intention and satisfaction. Consumers assume all customer-initiated transactions are handled automatically and are not interested in matters of system incompatibility. As we shall see, the chief architectural concerns on the systems side are to do with systems integration. |
From the organizational point of view, companies need to challenge the demarcation of fulfillment as an isolated function. If we are treating ecommerce as an inflected form of retail, then we are likely to see the efficient delivery of goods and services as a means of reducing stock in hand. But if we are to reduce cycle times, we also need to reduce latency in the enterprise's information flow. |
Confirmed orders should be echoed to production systems, as well as sales and ledger systems. Indeed, any order capture systems developed specifically for the ecommerce channel should be built with onward consumption by production systems as a priority design criterion ahead of management accounting requirements. |
Signs exist that some companies have flipped these priorities, with sales and commissions systems reaching a pitch of sophistication, while delivery requirements are rekeyed to legacy production systems or even printed to paper. Putting management reporting in the foreground can be tempting, especially when expenditure on a new channel must be justified. Failure to meet shipping promises, however, will have a more direct impact on the actual success of the channel. |
As well as streaming fulfillment in with order capture and customer service, organizations need to learn from the transaction patterns that inhabit the ecommerce channel and to implement predictive measures. This is a matter of translating behavioral and seasonal knowledge from the physical world to the online world. |
For example, a favorable review of a site generates new traffic, some of which is converted into sales. Predicting when such an event will happen or what level of impact it will have may be impossible. However, most such events are the result of proactive marketing activities carried out by the company itself. Site reviews tend to follow press releases or to mesh with sector surveys which, in turn, depend on product or service offerings from competitors. Average online demand is readily computed from server logs and companies can measure demand spikes by running test campaigns. In fact, this is the only way to assess the value of different online advertising strategies. |
Supply chain integration
Structurally, fulfillment begins to fade as an isolated concept in favor of a more holistic appreciation of the entire supply chain. This is perhaps the most profound internal result of a move to ecommerce. The shortening of conceptual distance between demand and supply begs a systems response, but it is one of integration rather than a point solution. And, although we have discussed this issue largely in the context of business-to-consumer interactions, the same is true in the business-to-business arena. |
The most abstract of business-to-business services are now being dispensed on a straight-through fulfillment basis, with customers able to stake out the calendars of their trusted advisors, the relevant personnel being notified after the event. The traditional autonomy of consultants is eroded by their inclusion in an efficient supply chain because they must accept the same kind of ambient workflow long associated with call center staff. So just as customer services staff are becoming better able to act as consultants, consultants are becoming more tightly bound into work practices that optimize their value. |
Supply chain integration is a potent topic in the ecommerce market place. As ecommerce erodes the barriers between discrete functions and organizations, so the ability of a player in one part of the chain to own a larger part of the chain grows. Delivery and logistics companies, for examples, are well placed to take more significant roles in the satisfaction of customer requests. Companies that can bind themselves into the chain stand to profit from it. |
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