Shall We Chat?

Real-time chat software in the call center helps you to simulate the mall experience in cyberspace. But do you need it to lure online shoppers?

Wouldn't it be great if you could just design your Web site, publicize it, then sit back and watch consumers rush in droves to make unassisted purchases? Of course it would. You'd only need enough manpower to maintain the site while you raked in the dough and your CSRs concentrated on answering the phones.

Unfortunately, shoppers accustomed to the hand-holding of store clerks might want the same amount of sales and service assistance during online excursions. In fact, customers who are not tech savvy might need additional help to navigate your site and buy products and services there.

Your Web store needs customer-service applications, but which applications are most useful to customers and most cost-effective for your company is a matter for debate. The choices include e-mail-response systems, lists of answers to frequently asked questions, quick-response text boxes for Q&A and real-time chat sysems.

Although the real-time virtual assistance offered by chat sounds good, there's some debate about whether online shoppers will be attracted by it. According to the findings of two recent surveys, chat is less attractive to many consumers than some of the other forms of online service.

On the basis of a January survey of 547 Internet users, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers (www.pwcglobal.com) concluded that online shopping aids such as search engines, product-information features and toll-free numbers to customer service are the features that can transform online shoppers into buyers.

“Online shopping features such as customer service, personalization and wish lists are used by a smaller percentage of online shoppers and are less important to online shoppers when selecting an online shopping site,” PWC's report said.

In NFO Interactive's survey of 2,134 online shoppers (www.nfoi.com), which included both buyers and non-buyers, 41% of the respondents said they would be more confident about shopping on sites that allow them to e-mail a sales representative for service. Forty-five percent said they would visit a site more frequently if the company responded to e-mail within 12 hours. Only 16% of the respondents reported using an online shopping agent when researching a product online or making a purchase.

On the other side of the debate, a Jupiter Communications report published this past summer lamented that less then one in five online retailers deployed Web technologies such as Java, Flash or chat functions to enhance online shoppers' experience and close sales (www.jup.com).

“Many retailers have designed their sites for the lowest common denominator, which is shortsighted, particularly for vendors of high-consideration goods,” stated Jupiter analyst Lydia Loizides in an announcement of the research findings. “This practice ensures support for technology laggards, but retailers must also meet the rising expectations of experienced online shoppers.”

Wireless in Cyberspace

Most North American wireless carriers have not installed chat applications on their Web sites, although the sites show attempts at cost-effective customer service. For instance, Cingular's (www.cingular.com) cyber-service arena includes an “e-mail us” section. Under the heading “contact us,” a text box enables shoppers to send a message to the company, and the carrier lists a customer-service phone number. On Nextel's site (www.nextel.com), an “online help desk” incorporates written information, a form for tracking orders and an option to request callbacks from customer-service agents. In addition to written answers to frequently asked questions, VoiceStream's (www.voicestream.com) site also contains an order-tracking feature. Verizon's (www.verizonwireless.com) site provides a phone number for customer service, an e-mail option and an address for snail-mail correspondence.

Also among chat non-adopters are Bell Mobility (www.mobility.com), Sprint (www.sprintpcs.com) and Telus Mobility (www.telusmobility.com).

“It's something that down the road we would certainly consider,” said Catherine Hudon, Bell Mobility spokesperson, adding that real-time response to customers is always important. “As more customers (start) looking for real-time responses to their inquiries, we'll start looking for ways to address that need.”

Progressing to Chat

Although eGain (www.egain.com), Kana (www.kana.com) and Avaya (www.avaya.com) representatives extol the virtues of chat (in varying degrees), they admit that wireless carriers aren't deploying their companies' chat apps.

Explaining the phenomenon, Jack Chawla, eGain Live product manager, said that the company's wireless clients are implementing systems to manage e-mail-responses right now. The next step, he predicts, will be the deployment of real-time chat in call centers.

“Maybe three or four months down the line, we will see people moving toward chat in the wireless industry,” Chawla said.

David Fowler, Kana Communications president, expects the growing popularity of wireless chat among consumers to encourage carriers to offer it as a customer-service option.

Attractive Web Features

PricewaterhouseCoopers asked 547 Internet users which Web features would increase the likelihood of purchases. Here's what they said:

Favored Features	Percentage of Respondents
Close-up product images	44%
Product availability	39%
Product comparison guides	34%
Search function	30%
Toll-free number for customer service	25%
Product reviews by online shoppers	24%
E-Retail Intelligence System Internet Users Consumer Panel, January 2001

“The reason we got so heavily into e-mail with companies is that as soon as they set up Web sites, the first question they had was, ‘If I have a problem here, why can't I just send an e-mail to resolve the problem? I'm already online,’” Fowler said. “It's the same with the wireless devices. As (carriers) offer chat to their customers, they need to be able to offer chat out of their support centers as well.”

Both Chawla and Fowler note a natural progression from phone-based customer-service systems to e-mail-response systems, then to real-time customer service. Ynette Gibbs, Avaya director of product marketing, said that many of Avaya's chat clients chose to first master phone-call management before progressing to e-mail management. Gibbs views chat as a hybrid of voice and e-mail.

“It has an attribute of e-mail in that it's written,” she said. “It has an attribute of voice in that it's real-time.”

Beyond the obvious advantage of serving customers in real-time, chat reduces customers' wait time, according to Chawla.

“On the phone, you generally have to wait from five minutes to half an hour to talk to an agent, and when you are on the phone, the kind of wait you have is more frustrating,” he said. “On the chat side, it probably won't be as frustrating because you can always start another browser and do other stuff. Also, the chat queues tend to be smaller because (chat allows CSRs to serve) customers faster.”

For Fowler, chat's biggest advantage is the ability to close sales on the spot. He said companies could choose to offer chat only for customers who are in the midst of choosing or purchasing products or for the most valuable customers.

Gibbs adds response consistency to the list of advantages.

“If you have suggested auto response as part of your text chat, which our products offer, that gives a company the flexibility of having adhoc responses or ones that are pre-configured to give a consistent message back on consistent questions,” she said.

Another advantage of chat is the ability of CSRs to respond to several customers at once.

“I've heard companies say that they have some chat wizards who seem to be able to hold four or five conversations simultaneously on the Internet,” Fowler said. “But the issue for most agents is that they're not that multitasking.”

Both Chawla and Fowler identified chat's downside as the need to have agents fulfilling the function in real time. Fowler also mentioned that customers tend to be wordy in chat sessions; whereas, in e-mail correspondence, customers usually summarize their questions or concerns.

“Chat sessions tend to take on a life of their own,” Fowler said. For example, customers start chatting with CSRs about the weather. Or, the agent responds to a question and, assuming he's finished, moves on, only to receive another question from the previous customer.

For Gibbs, the downside, though not a serious one, is building and managing the auto-response library.

Sifting Through Software

Chat applications come in several flavors. In addition to text chat, eGain Live includes queue management and a meeting function, which allows sales reps to meet with several customers at once, push PowerPoint presentations to the customers and share files with them. EGain Voice, an add-on module, enables simultaneous text and voice chat, and eGain Interact, a collaboration system, enables CSRs and customers to look at pages and fill out forms together. EGain's TCB, which stands for “the call-center bridge,” integrates eGain Live with customer-care and billing systems.

Base prices for licensing the eGain Live software are $21,000 for five CSR seats, $6,500 for five seats of the hosted version. Before discounts or added charges, eGain's Interact costs $17,000 for five seats and $3,500 for five seats of the hosted version. EGain's Voice module is available in a hosted version at $4,550 for five seats or in a block of 550 hours for $4,550.

According to Chawla, eGain's interactive software has undergone four major changes over the years.

“We started off with chat, then we added meetings, then the different modules, eGain Voice and eGain Interact,” he said.

Chat Assessment

Pros	Cons
Customer satisfaction as a result of the added convenience. For instance, customers with one phone line wouldn't have to disconnect from the Web to get real-time customer service.	Because it's in real time, chat requires live agents, which is more costly than solutions such as e-mail-response systems.
CSRs can serve multiple customers at once.	Not all CSRs can handle multiple customer interactions at once.
Enables companies to close sales online, rather than just waiting for customers to hit a buy button.	Customers tend to be more casual with CSRs and take up more time.

In the future, the company plans to add wireless text and voice chat, and a personalization feature that enables customers to contact their favorite CSRs. If the agent is not available, the system will forward those customers to the regular queue. According to Chawla, eGain also plans to establish relationships with messaging companies such as AOL, so that customers can send CSRs instant messages.

Kana's Chat suite includes Kana Voice for voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications and Kana I-Mail, a blend of chat and e-mail. The way I-Mail works is that customers type an inquiry into a text box and send it to the company's customer-service department. Although CSRs don't respond in real time, customers receive immediate notice of when they'll get a response. Then a routing system forwards the query to CSRs for response at that time.

“The difference between chat and I-Mail is that when an agent responds to a message, they can go off to do other things,” Fowler said. “If the customer types another question, it's routed to whatever agent is available.” However, the new agent will be able to pull up a history of the customer's previous I-Mails.

Kana licenses its software on a per-seat basis. The e-mail, I-Mail and Voice software can be licensed as a suite or as standalone applications. The software ranges from about $400 a seat for chat alone to about $2,000 a seat for the full suite.

According to Fowler, Kana's software has evolved to accommodate customers' desires to handle transactions across multiple channels such as phone voice and e-mail, and to enable CSRs and customers to view complete transaction histories.

“We have a wireless customer, for example, that wanted to set up a portal for every customer, so that instead of calling the call center, all of the basic questions that they would ask were answered for them on the screen,” Fowler said. “That's pushing the communications off of the contact center and out to the customer. At the same time, they offer a variety of communication channels so that if a customer gets stuck, they can move to a phone conversation or an e-mail, chat or I-Mail sessions.”

Avaya's CentreVu Internet Solutions suite includes text chat, a VoIP application, an e-mail-response system and a collaboration application that lets agents push pages to customers and guide customers through other Web sites for comparison shopping.

CentreVu Internet Solutions ranges from $100,000 to $200,000, depending on the integration complexity of a project and factors such as call-center size.

Avaya plans to release software this month that will mine CSRs' written responses to questions and automatically generate new responses for a company's response library.