E-Customer Service Gets Real

Computerworld - A technology analyst bought a house that came with a clothes dryer made by a brand-name manufacturer. The lint screen in the dryer was torn, and the analyst went to the manufacturer's Web site to purchase a replacement.
He couldn't find what he wanted on the site, but there was a note posted promising that the company's customer service department would respond to all e-mails within 48 hours. So the analyst dashed one off.
More than a year later, he still hasn't received a response.
Experiences like this aren't always typical of Web-based customer service, but they're common enough to make many online customers skeptical about waiting for an e-mail response to an inquiry. And today's Internet shoppers are increasingly sophisticated, have more complex questions and want the immediate satisfaction that only real-time responses can provide.
Increasingly, shoppers expect instant customer service via a toll-free number, live text chat or other real-time response.
Come Talk to Me
While studies from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. show that e-mail remains the primary means of communicating with customers for the vast majority of e-commerce sites, more and more e-businesses are either adding new functionality or making plans to do so soon. "Because of what the Internet has provided in the last five years, demand has definitely shifted," notes Oliver Deschryver, chief technology officer at DHL Airways Inc. in Redwood City, Calif.
"At this point, the customer wants to control the interface with the company. That demands some changes within your system - and a lot of changes within the corporate culture," Deschryver says.
DHL offers contact with its customer service representatives only via e-mail or phone. But Deschryver says adding text chat and collaborative browsing are "definitely part of the strategy" and should be implemented within a year.
Although installing real-time communications technologies such as live chat and collaborative browsing can cost organizations upward of $4,000 for each customer representative station, the payoffs can be dramatic. A report from Forrester released last December placed the average cost of answering a customer's call to a toll-free call center at $33. In contrast, it costs organizations just $10 on average to answer a customer's e-mail.
"One of the benefits to chat is that a service rep can handle three to five chat sessions at a time, as compared to only one phone call," notes David Daniels, an analyst at Jupiter Research Inc. in New York. He adds that his research has found that most companies are using application service providers to host their text