Mele’s Musings

Humanizing the Online Customer Experience

Online customer service stinks because most e-tail sites are too enamored with technology solving their problems, and are not taking the time to really understand their customers.

Image: Amazon.com

Article excerpt:  If shoppers got the same kind of experience in real-world stores that they’ve come to expect online, sales floors would soon become a sea of empty shopping carts — and, despite gas prices, customers would be pulling out of parking lots in droves to head for the competition. The Internet has seen massive adoption. Online retailing has continued to dramatically build its customer base and more and more companies are sending their offline customers to the Internet for service and support. To service both these old and new customers, the Internet has already had an abundant history of “self-service” tools that have each seen their boom and bust cycle. Active forms, eCRM and analytics have all tried to make the Internet an equal, but more cost-effective, participant in the world of customer communications along with Mr. Bell’s great invention, the telephone. A problem remains. In spite of the Internet’s massive adoption, in spite of its remarkable power to make (and unmake) entire new industries, online customer service  remains the ugly stepchild of corporate America. We say that we want to satisfy customers online. We say that we want them to feel just as well-served online as in the high touch bricks and mortar store or when they are on a telephone speaking with a human sales representative. Why does customer service lag so far behind on the Internet, even as so many are adopting the Web as their favored method of finding goods, services and information?
The rest: ecommercetimes.com

Musing:  I couldn’t agree more with this article.  It is exactly on the money in my book, and I have blogged on this subject before – online companies, particularly retailers – are so enamored with trackable behaviors and finding the right algorithm for the next customer need that they absolutely neglect the fact that what really matters to people is interaction.  How many times have you not bought something because you just wanted to talk to someone – on the phone or in the store?  Yet etailers seem to be afraid of allowing the online experience to be more human.  And they are leaving dollars on the table by doing so.  While some form of automation will always be valuable, we have to bring the human back into the interactions we are creating.