We’ll examine and discuss each of these criteria in this report.
PSGroup Evaluation Framework for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
©
2008 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria
of the PSGroup evaluation frame-work for assisted-service for ecommerce.
ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE
Helping Your Customers Explore, Select, and Purchase Your Products and Services
In our customer service research and consulting practice, we talk about cross-channel,
cross-lifecycle customer service. By cross-lifecycle, we mean that customers
want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, from their initial
contact with you through their retirement. By cross-channel, we’ve
meant that customers want your help on every channel through which they interact
with you—the Web and email for self-service, your contact center, stores,
and your field service force for assisted-service.
Ecommerce systems use the Web self-service channel to let customers perform
activities within the explore, select, purchase, and maintain lifecycle phases.
They’re your self-service Web marketing and sales application. Most
commonly, ecommerce systems let customers learn about your products, compare
them, configure them, price them, buy them, and even return them. Ecommerce
systems also have account management capabilities. Your customers create
ecommerce accounts in order to register their payment methods, shipping methods,
and name and address in order to pay for and receive your products.
In Table A, we list these activities within each lifecycle phase in a little
more detail.
Customer Ecommerce Activities
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/fw01-24-08cc.)
Table A. Typical ecommerce activities that customers perform are listed in
this table within their lifecycle phase.
Customers Need Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
Sometimes, customers need assisted-service to perform these activities. For
example, your ecommerce system may be missing important services or content
around the products in which they’re interested such as the detailed
description and configurator for a brand-new bundle. Or you don’t provide
content about replacements and compatibility for products that you’re
about to discontinue. Or you don’t let them change their username online.
At other times, customers need assisted-service because they have difficulty
using your ecommerce facilities to perform these activities. For example,
they can’t find they product they want to buy by using their terminology
in your ecommerce search service. Or your product descriptions don’t
include the information critical to their selection approach like laundering
instructions. Or they’re confused by the wording of your “two
for” promotion. Or your account registration form has a field that
they don’t understand.
At still other times, customers need assisted-service because they can’t
or won’t use the Web to do business with you. Telephone assisted-service
with your agents is their preferred or only available channel.
Agents Have Used Many Systems to Deliver Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
You’ve probably always made customer service agents available by telephone
(and, more recently, available via Web chat) to help ecommerce customers perform
these activities. Agents have delivered this assisted-service through a range
of facilities including the same self-service ecommerce facilities available
to customers; the facilities of your CRM systems; through the facilities of
your back-office financial management, order management, and fulfillment systems;
and through their experience and expertise with your business.
These assisted-service approaches have worked but have had disadvantages of
high complexity, low effectiveness, and high cost.
Ecommerce systems are typically not your systems of record for customer/account
data, order data, or financial data. When agents need to access account information,
they access your CRM system. When agents need to access payment information,
they access your financial/ERP system. And so on. All of your key, operational
systems are accessed from your agents’ desktops. That’s a complex
UI and complex integration to the back end.
Then, of course, customer service effectiveness and efficiency is dependent
on your agents learning all of these systems and using them concurrently.
That’s a lot of training. Customer service agent is a high turnover
position across many industries. So a high percentage of your agents are
always in learning mode, and learning mode doesn’t result in effective
or efficient assisted-service.
High cost results from your IT development and integration efforts to create
and maintain the agent desktop, from your continuing training of agents to
learn a complex environment, and from less than optimally effective and efficient
delivery of assisted-service.
Basically, ecommerce systems were designed for self-service. They let individual
consumers or representatives of business accounts select and purchase products
and manage the information related to those purchases.
Ecommerce systems have been missing the services and data that customer service
agents need to deliver assisted-service, services like price overrides and
returns processing. And they’ve been missing support for system-wide
customer service agent roles to access and update all their customer/account,
order, and payment data.
Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications
A better approach to assisted-service for ecommerce is multi-channel ecommerce
applications that support Web self-service and Web chat and contact center
assisted-service. Multi-channel ecommerce applications should provide role-based
access to the data and services that agents need in order to perform the
activities for which customers need assisted-service. For example, the customer
service agent role should provide the service that lets agents view and update
the product, quantity, price, payment, or shipping of any order item of any
customer’s order. It should also provide a service that lets agents
view and offer any of the promotions that you’ve created for a particular
product. In addition, multi-channel ecommerce provides role-based access
to additional assisted-service capabilities such as changing prices, authorizing
returns, and making accommodations.
Multi-channel ecommerce has significant advantages and benefits over current,
multi-system approaches to assisted-service: