Advancing your B2C web presence

Now that we have explored CRM systems and data mining, let us talk briefly about one of the emerging areas occurring in modern business, notably web enabled capabilities.

Before discussing this latest digital advance, it is useful to step back and explore the strengths of a human being when it comes to increasing customer loyalty. First, people bring to a customer interface a versatility and the high ability to interact. This is very difficult to mirror or better using technology. However, in saying this, having a person answering every enquiry can be quite expensive per contact, particularly if you wish to save time and money in handling routine enquiries on a twenty-four hour seven day cycle. Constant person-to-person contact can also lead to burnout of staff as well as a higher chance for inconsistency. Keeping people up to date with information is also a huge challenge, particularly in a high-growth or rapidly changing consumer market.

As a result, deploying B2C web technology is seen as a way of reaping the benefits of human touch by supplementing people contact with very interactive, fast and less error-prone digital support. As can be seen in Internet banking, the transaction price for the customer is cheaper and they can do transactions in their own time. It is expected that as connectivity and bandwidth improve we will begin to see more three-dimensional, e-learning and virtual shopping as a regular feature on the Internet.

Bryan Bergeron in his book, The Eternal E-Customer , discusses the emergence of what he calls emotional intelligent interfaces (EII). Here customer e-mail and web-based enquiries are answered by a software robot with empathy and emotional connection. The result is that the customer is under the impression that they have been dealing with a human when, in fact, it is a computer surrogate. In the past this capability has largely been unsuccessful . For example in 1995 Microsoft launched an emotional interface called BOB. The BOB system was used to respond to customer enquiries by e-mail and chat in a somewhat emotional and empathetic way. However, most people found the persona of BOB somewhat condescending, patronizing and insulting. Since then there have been many advances particularly in the more routine conversations using natural voice recognition. In more recent times the Australian Racing Authority (TAB in Queensland) has been using natural language speech recognition technology for placing bets on races. It is claimed that in excess of 95 per cent fewer calls need to be passed on to human operators.

It will be interesting to see how this field develops in the future. No doubt it is both exciting and somewhat controversial . I know that when I recently called for a taxi I was dismayed to have to talk to a computer, but the system worked perfectly .