An “A” for E-commerce
Feb 22nd, 2008 by Colin Beasty
It seems like I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about e-commerce, whether it was with partners at SugarCon, fellow colleagues, or with customers, such as today. Everybody is trying to do a better job at it, whether it’s via tighter integration with their CRM solution or simply refining their business practices so customers have the same branded experience on the Web as they do in the store.
Therefore, I took particular note with a study released this week by ForeSee Results, a small analyst firm that measures customer satisfaction across industries and channels. I’m familiar with their work from my days as a journalist at CRM magazine, and always respected the results of their studies as a credible and accurate source of information.
In the latest report, Larry Freed, the report’s author, made a great point: “When you go to the sites, you’re looking for more than what you got in the past.” That couldn’t be more true, and is certainly an issue that many of SugarCRM’s customers are trying to solve to this day.
Simply put, the definition of customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect. The Web is no different. That said, consumers expectations have reached a plateau in terms of their expectations from brick-and-mortar locations, whereas the Web is still being driven by its growing popularity and importance. While customer satisfaction may be judged by a consumer’s interaction relative to other industries, the expectations will always be restricted to the individual experience. Ensuring that one-to-one experience on the Web will be the key to maintaining happy customers for years to come.
Brick-and-mortar expereince is comprised of two main parts: 1) finding what you are looking for in a store 2) getting help from a sales person. Arguably, a well-executed online store could be better than brick-and-mortar on both counts. A website can be organized in such as way that products are easier to find - there has been plenty improvement in the way merchants structure and organize their websites. What is interesting that not much innovation has occured in online Sales Person-Consumer interaction. The last innovation in this area has been live chat. Live chat allowed online shopper to get in touch with Sales Agent faster than what calling 1-800-number promised. In the last 5 years the was a promise of another innovation - CoBrowsing, a technology that allowed Agents and Consumers to see the same screen, select products and shop together. Unfortunately first-generation CoBrowsing technologies were not able to accomplish what live chat was able to deliver - to work universally on any computer simply from a click on a button. While many CRM packages list CoBrowsing as one of capabilities, they all have first-generation CoBrowsing technologies, which suffer from serious limitations: 1) work on IE browser only, 2) work only if Agent and Consumer are on the same version of IE, 3) do not work on pages with Flash, ActiveX, and all other pop up technologies, 4) do not work on complex web pages. These limitations allowed first-generation CoBrowse work in so few cases that Agents practically did not use it.
We at LiveLOOK are exited to introduce into the market second-generation CoBrowsing technology that ia as universal as live chat - it works with any browser, on webpages of any complexity, and with any pop ups. It is our belief that CoBrowsing between Agent and Consumer is as close to brick-and-mortar shopping experience as it can get - seeing the same products, and visually co-shopping together online is similar to the one-on-one interaction in the store.
The King of all shopping experience would be shopping on a well-organized site and interacting, if desired, one-on-one with an Agent who can see exactly what you are seing. Seeing the same view allows for a fun and productive co-shopping expereince which leaves shopper with a positive brand impression.