Web customer service

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

====================

I especially liked this part -

"...why are the frequently asked questions on the Web sites I
frequent so frequently not the questions I frequently ask, I ask?"

====================

Customer Service Via E-Mail? There's No Simple, or Human, Answer for
Your Web Site Questions

Fred Barbash
Washington Post 8/2/99


In my eighth-grade French class, we were asked to memorize a series
of answers, so that when the teacher came around and asked us
questions in French, we might know how to respond. The problem was
that I rarely understood the questions, so chances were high I would
flawlessly deliver an irrelevant answer.

It went like this:

"When does the train leave, Frederique?"

"The pen is over there, Mademoiselle Morgan."

I am reminded of this often when, having failed to find the desired
information in the ubiquitous FAQs on a commercial Web site, I send
it an electronic mail and get a response that completely misses the
point of my query.

Why does that happen? Because one of the World Wide Web's dirty
little secrets is that there usually aren't human beings looking at
incoming e-mail such as mine. Rather, the messages are examined by a
computer program that purports to have "artificial intelligence,"
and responses are sent out based on what it thinks you want.

It's ironic, because when these sites are selling ads, they call us
"unique visitors" and boast about how many of us they have. And one
of the great claims of e-tailing is personalization: Their software
can find out everything about you, and tailor services to suit your
individualized needs.

As Barney says, you are special -- except when it comes to getting
questions answered, at which point one size fits all.

The useless FAQs (why are the frequently asked questions on the Web
sites I frequent so frequently not the questions I frequently ask, I
ask?) and the canned e-mails present a lesson in hubris: Only the
folks in this business would figure they know what I want to know
before I know I want to know it!

Recently we rented a beach house in North Carolina with one of those
telephones that intrudes on outgoing calls by making you sit through
tape recordings directing you to overpriced phone service providers.
How, I asked in an e-mail to CompuServe -- my Internet service
provider -- could I work around this tape recording so it wouldn't
disrupt my online experience?

Surely, I thought, this company, which is now owned by America Online
Inc., has dealt with travelers attempting to use the service from
hotel rooms and other strange locations. Surely someone there would
know the answer.

The answer: 

Dear [my membership number; I don't even rate a name]: I am writing
in response to your recent question. We are sorry [Hmmm. First "I."
Now "We." A crowd has gathered], but unfortunately we do not support
that ability at this time. However, we do rely on our members'
feedback, and all comments submitted to us are forwarded to the
appropriate department for consideration. Thank you again for voicing
your concerns.

Doug

Member Services

Come on "Doug." This isn't even close. What "ability" is "Doug"
referring to? What "concerns" did I voice? I just asked a simple
question, which "Doug" didn't answer. What Doug told me, getting back
to my French lesson, is that the pen is over there, Monsieur.

My online brokerage went the other way in response to a question I
sent asking whether, if I purchased a mutual fund online, I could add
to it regularly in some way without paying a commission each time, as
I can if I purchase it directly from the mutual fund. 

The brokerage (I'm not mentioning the name because it's the only one
I use and I beat up on it all the time in these pages) sent me a very
long response that was roughly the entire policy and rate schedule
for buying and selling stocks, options and mutual funds, essentially
a restatement of the FAQs. For all the verbiage, it left my question
unanswered.

What the brokerage gave me was the entire train schedule, which, as
it turned out, left off my train.

I sent off another e-mail objecting to this non-answer and finally
got the answer I was looking for.

(I must admit here that I have also benefited from automated
inanity. A few months ago I ordered a pair of tennis shoes online. I
received a single shoe in a box. I e-mailed the company requesting
the second shoe. It responded with a pair of shoes one day; a second
pair another day; a third pair another day; and yes, a fourth pair on
the last day. On the fifth day it rested -- or someone finally read
my daily messages stating that I only wanted the missing shoe and
would not pay for anything more. I swear this is true. I've got the
shoes to prove it. I've not been billed, either.)

The problem here, of course, is the pathetic technology of automated
responses. I understand the need for it when there are many, many
customers and a relative handful of employees. But all the time? And
it's getting worse, not better, as the numbers of customers increase.

Sky Dayton, founder and president of EarthLink Network (one of the
most successful Internet service provider portals in the world)
bemoaned the "technology industry's general inability to treat its
customers as intelligent human beings" at a recent Internet
conference I attended in California. EarthLink employs 2,300 people,
with 1,600 of them providing support to customers.

"Instead of seeing support as a vexing cost like other technology
firms," Dayton told me in an e-mail interview, "we saw it as a
competitive advantage for EarthLink, to become the one place in the
world you can call any time day or night and get an intelligent HUMAN
to answer your questions."

I appreciate the cost and understand that not all companies,
particularly mass market e-tailers, can make EarthLink's investment.
Guy Jones, president and co-founder of IslandData Corp., a Carlsbad,
Calif.-based Internet messaging company, estimates that the highest
number of e-mails that a well-trained human can answer in a day is
about 100, with a cost of $3 to $15 per message, depending on
efficiency and complexity.

"It's pretty simple math," he said. "Yahoo receives 500,000 e-mails
a month. They'd have to have more support agents than . . .
employees. The only way around this is autoresponse," which is what
Jones's company specializes in.

"Absolutely," Jones said, "there is a problem. There's a paradigm
shift in the way customers are asking for support and companies don't
yet know what to do with it." Too many, he said, are still relying
excessively on FAQs. "That puts the burden on me to go find the
answers. So customers are increasingly using e-mail, throwing the
ball back to the company."

The companies are using inadequate response tools, he said, many
still relying on designating words in a question as keywords, which
may or may not be terribly relevant, to trigger the sending of a
canned response.

For example, one technology company with which he is familiar
received an e-mail about a hard drive failure with the comment that
"if I don't solve this problem I'm gonna lose this job." The keyword
zeroed in on was "job" and the message got routed to the company's
human resources department. That's bad.

Companies need more sophisticated autoresponders, he said, "natural
language processing systems" that see the phrase "if I can't get
this disc drive installed I lose my job" and figure out that the last
four words are, for problem solving purposes, superfluous.

Part of the goal of the autoresponse technology is to determine when
a company doesn't "have the right answer," in canned form; when a
query needs to be escalated to a human level. "The worst thing is to
respond back with irrelevant information," he said.

People in e-tailing boast that they've compressed everything in the
life cycle of traditional businesses -- financing, growth, brand
recognition -- so that everything happens faster than it ever did
with traditional companies.

I don't disagree. It took conventional businesses half a century to
forget their manners and alienate customers. The online businesses
are getting the job done in a few years.

Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company





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