A NUMBER of recurring strategies emerged at DCI’s three-day Customer Relationship Management Conference & Exposition last month in Chicago.
Cutting-edge Internet marketers are adding live help to their customer service options. A prominent “Please Help” button on a marketer’s site allowsa live operator to offer assistance to a Web site visitor, either through a series of instant messages, a telephone call or even directly through the computer, provided the user has a microphone and a speaker attachment. Several conference panelists noted that consumers frequently abandon online shopping carts before the final sale (estimates as to the exact quantity varied from session to session), often for want of a single question being answered.
A live operator can answer questions, lead the visitor through the site, or move appropriate pages to the user’s computer. Most conference speakers advocating live intervention leaned toward the instant messaging option. Such systems allow an average-skilled operator to handle three or four conversations simultaneously, using downtime – while a visitor is thinking about (or typing) a response – to switch to another site viewer.
If a DMer has information gathered on a customer at its fingertips, the help offered can be further customized. Marketers should note, though, that with the advent of the instant reward culture bred by e-commerce, customers expect all potential touch points to be able to pick up a conversation, without having to backtrack and fill in information already volunteered.
Merchants are also realizing the value of customer satisfaction metrics, and wise suppliers are racing to meet their needs. But there is room for best practices to emerge, as some marketers wonder whether the needs vendors’ products address match those they’re dealing with. Once an incident – for example, a sale, complaint or inquiry – is resolved, online merchants are unsure of which metrics would be the most useful to analyze. The time or number of calls needed for resolution? Cross-sell or upsell from the original request? Exhibit-hall interviews with conference goers revealed frustration at not knowing which questions to ask, much less having answers.
Attendees also expressed frustration regarding the lack of standards among systems. Conference keynoters pointed out that no marketer has fully integrated all facets of CRM, and few are even close.
As such, there has been no substantive demand for unified systems standards. Some of the consultants at the conference didn’t see this as a problem, claiming that marketers each define CRM differently.
Consultants integrate the systems piecemeal, much the same way their clients build them. As one disgruntled attendee put it, “If they say `We can integrate [two systems],’ then why aren’t they together yet?”
Network
