NETTING IT OUT

Sometimes customers need your help to perform ecommerce activities. They’d like to escalate from self-service to assisted-service in order to complete their work. We call that help assisted-service for ecommerce.

ATG Commerce Service Center is ATG’S assisted-service for ecommerce offering. CSC was introduced in June 2007 and is available as one of the separately-priced modules of the ATG Service suite, all of which are add-ons to, and tightly integrated with ATG Commerce. To date, ATG claims that approximately 20 customer accounts have purchased CSC.

On the PSGroup Report Card for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce, ATG Commerce Service Center exceeds requirements for roles and operational functionality. It needs improvement in channel support and analytic functionality.

With qualification, we recommend ATG CSC to every organization that has implemented ATG Commerce as the mechanism for delivering assisted-service and a cross-channel customer experience for ecommerce. The qualification is for the lack of packaged reports in the current product version to help you analyze and refine your assisted-service ecommerce experience. For those organizations in the process of selecting an ecommerce platform, ATG CSC makes ATG Commerce a more attractive choice.

ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE

Helping Your Customers Explore, Select, and Purchase Your Products and Services

In our customer service research and consulting practice, we talk about cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. By cross-lifecycle, we mean that customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, from their initial contact with you through their retirement. By cross-channel, we’ve meant that customers want your help on every channel through which they interact with you—the Web and email for self-service, your contact center, stores, and your field service force for assisted-service.

Ecommerce systems use the Web self-service channel to let customers perform activities within the “explore, select, purchase, and maintain” lifecycle phases. They’re your self-service Web marketing and sales application. Most commonly, ecommerce systems let customers learn about your products, compare them, configure them, price them, buy them, and even return them. Ecommerce systems also have account management capabilities. Your customers create ecommerce accounts in order to register their payment methods, shipping methods, and name and address in order to pay for and receive your products.

In Table A, we list these activities within each lifecycle phase in a little more detail.

Customer Ecommerce Activities
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table.)
Table A. Typical ecommerce activities that customers perform are listed in this table within their lifecycle phase.

Customers Need Assisted-Service for Ecommerce

Sometimes, customers need assisted-service to perform these activities. For example, your ecommerce system may be missing important services or content around the products in which they’re interested such as the detailed description and configurator for a brand-new bundle. Or you don’t provide content about replacements and compatibility for products that you’re about to discontinue. Or you don’t let them change their username online.

At other times, customers need assisted-service because they have difficulty using your ecommerce facilities to perform these activities. For example, they can’t find they product they want to buy by using their terminology in your ecommerce search service. Or your product descriptions don’t include the information critical to their selection approach like laundering instructions. Or they’re confused by the wording of your “two for” promotion. Or your account registration form has a field that they don’t understand.

At still other times, customers need assisted-service because they can’t or won’t use the Web to do business with you. Telephone assisted-service with your agents is their preferred or only available channel.

Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications

The best approach to assisted-service for ecommerce is multi-channel ecommerce applications that support Web self-service and Web chat and contact center assisted-service. Multi-channel ecommerce applications should provide role-based access to the data and services that agents need in order to perform the activities for which customers need assisted-service. For example, the customer service agent role should provide the service that lets agents view and update the product, quantity, price, payment, or shipping of any order item of any customer’s order. It should also provide a service that lets agents view and offer any of the promotions that you’ve created for a particular product. In addition, multi-channel ecommerce provides role-based access to additional assisted-service capabilities such as changing prices, authorizing returns, and making accommodations.

Extending ecommerce to multiple channels can have bottom-line impact, reducing costs and increasing revenue and making assisted-service for ecommerce a critical component of your customer experience...