Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) – the ability to talk to a customer service rep through your computer without having to make a telephone call – is a technology still very much in its infancy, and as much as two years away from the kind of perfection that might draw critical mass.
Due to the lack of strong marketplace adoption, e-tailers such as Lands’ End and Smarterkids.com see no reason to make it a priority. “We’ve played with it,” says Bill Bass, vice president of e-commerce for Dodgeville, WI-based Lands’ End, “but there is a limited number of people using it right now, and we don’t feel that enough of our customers want it to make the service viable.”
Al Noyes, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Smarterkids. com, Needham, MA, agrees. “We didn’t go with it at the same time we launched e-mail and text chat capability because we wanted to start off incrementally. Since we haven’t seen a great deal of demand for live voice yet among our audience, it just wasn’t a priority.” The bottom line: “I just don’t think it’s the killer app for online retailers right now.”
Why aren’t more customers using it? Partly because of technology issues on their end. First, they need a computer that is audio- and video-enabled. They must have a program such as Microsoft’s NetMeeting or Netscape’s Communicator that enables voice through the computer. Both programs are free. And they’ll need a microphone, which is a simple $10 purchase. This type of installation isn’t complicated. The problem lies in awareness. No association or organization has taken the responsibility for getting the word out and educating consumers on the availability of the technology and its capabilities.
LACK OF CONSISTENCY
But the main reason for the lack of enthusiasm is a familiar Internet problem: bandwidth. “The quality of the call itself is still poor,” says Bass. Too poor, he feels, to add value to customer service. The reason for the poor quality is a lack of consistency in the protocol standards across call routing manufacturers. Translation in layman’s terms: “Voice and data travel through lines in packets. These packets share one highway, and the highway carries traffic in both directions,” he says. Each direction has just one lane of traffic. Since data packets automatically move to the front of the line, voice packets must sit and wait their turn. “Currently,” says Bass, “data packets have priority over voice packets, which results in voices breaking up and fading out, the same way they do when a cell phone is too far from a tower.” To make VoIP work, he adds, “Protocols must be set among the manufacturers to give voice packets priority over data packets. And until that happens, you’! re not going to see critical mas s.”
Penetration is stronger among business-to-business companies. “Studies show that 80% of all business-to-business computers now have the right hardware and software for VoIP, and next year the percentage will be even higher,” predicts Rich Hebert, president and chief executive officer of Sky Alland Marketing (Columbia, MD), a customer contact center management company. “For one, Microsoft began shipping NetMeeting as standard software in January, and second, the cost of multimedia PCs has come down significantly. At Dell, a majority of their PCs also currently ship VoIP-enabled.”
Once demand increases, both e-tailers say they’ll be on board.
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