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In the real world, you can pay lip service to customer service and the resultant damage is hidden in the anonymous attrition of customers wandering away to the competition with a sigh and a shake of the head.
The Internet, however, is a ruthless amplifier of weakness in business process. Answer a snail mail letter from a customer within two weeks and they might be satisfied. Fail to answer the email the same customer sends you from your website within four hours and they're already fuming at you for your disinterest in them. As all those surveys about customer dis-satisfaction with websites relentlessly show, it's about service, stupid.
Before going further, I have to declare a bias here: I first became a fan of Jim Sterne when I saw him give a talk in which he illustrated how to use interactivity and personalisation to achieve web `stickiness'. Sterne chose the unlikely-sounding Clairol site - the hair and beauty products company. It allows you to post a digital photo of yourself on the site and then try on several different hairstyles.
The hairstyles come in the form of `virtual wigs' that you stick on your digital head. Sterne had tested the site and showed his audience the result, throwing up a slide of himself, bearded, tie-and-jacket-wearing, grinning defiantly from underneath a long blonde wig. It took several minutes for the audience to recover.
Sterne's wit and his relentless honesty are a powerful combination and come through in this book as much as in person, to make this an entertaining as well as informative read. Honesty? Too many Internet authors revel in complexity. Sterne de-mystifies and de-bunks, using an intentionally naïve-looking approach.
For example, in the book he asks a couple of experts to explain what the modish CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is all about, allowing the differences in their answers, which he produces verbatim, to show that the software industry is all over the place in trying to define CRM, energetically re-branding everything in sight. Salesforce Automation? Nah, that was last year. This year we're calling it CRM...
As well as offering unbiased commentary to help you steer through the maze of software and solutions on offer from the IT vendor community, Sterne takes you step by step through the basics, with impressive attention to detail.
The chapter on managing email, for example, is forty-five pages long and packed with examples of how to get it right (and wrong).
What makes the nuts and bolts `how tos' in this book so compelling is the lacerating wit that Sterne uses to deal with those who get it wrong. There's a four-page evisceration of Volvo Cars, for example, for consistently failing to allow customers to email complaints about their cars through the company's website. Sterne catalogues the failures mercilessly, before concluding: "Volvo has tried to open a receptive ear to the public, but it forgot the Q-Tips".
As well as acting as a manual for developing effective email practises, the book shows you in detail the best ways of approaching now traditional customer help mechanisms like Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs), how to let customers talk to each other to provide you with vital market knowledge, how to practise personalisation and get to know customers as individuals, and - all-importantly - how to develop measurements that allow you to translate the success of your customer service initiatives into loyalty and retention figures that the Finance Director will listen to.
If you want to learn from Jim face to face, and can make it to London this Fall, Jim will be giving two Masterclasses on 11 and 12 October 2000 on how to do this Internet customer service stuff better. (Email Phil@eCustomerServiceWorld.com for details). I was hoping to conclude with a criticism - that the built-in problem with a book like this is that it becomes redundant as soon as it is in print, as the toddler that is web customer service grows up fast to become a spotty adolescent. The past couple of months, for example, have seen a wave of `assisted buying' software solutions break onto the market which further blur the sales/service departmental divide (a functional business divide that is everywhere in the real world but which, as Sterne shows, does not translate to the Web).
But, there are too many universal fundamentals covered in this book for that criticism to hold true. And, as hard as I tried to find examples of outdated material, this is one of those rarities, a thoroughly updated second edition of a book.
When I first met and corresponded with Jim Sterne, I realized
he "got it" when it came to the Internet and the World
Wide Web. Beyond the "hype" of hyperspace -- Jim understands
the issues from the technical, to the economical and practical.
His works often revolves around why some sites and businesses
work and others don't.
Jim interviewed me for a case study in Chapter 8 of the book,
"Cisco Systems -- A Case Study". He worked for weeks reviewing
the site, researching Cisco's history and our use of electronic
service to scale our business. He also interviewed Cisco
customers by email to see if it worked as well for them as
we Web-heads might sometimes claim. I was thoroughly impressed
by his thoroughness of study and insight into our business.
I was delighted to see the subject treated realistically,
without either extreme pie-in-the-sky Futurist or darkly
Orwellian sensationalist views of many in the media.
Instead, Jim has created a practical guide for how the Web
can and is being used for business, especially to provide
outstanding customer services. Like his previous book,
"World Wide Web Marketing", this is a great treatise for
those interested in incorporating or expanding their
Internet-based customer service offerings.
I was pleased to be associated with the book's publication,
and wanted to wish Jim Sterne and his publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. great success with it.
At your service!
-Peter Corless.
Content Manager
Software Library
Cisco Connection Online
http://www.cisco.com
pcorless@cisco.com
p.s. For those who have the book, and are wondering how fast
the Web is growing, look at the stats on page 273.
At that time (Mar 96), Cisco Connection Online had
28,000 registered customers and 130,000 visits a month.
This past month (Sept 96), we had 45,000 registered
customers and 300,000+ visits a month. (A single "visit"
consists of all the pages downloaded by the same
individual in a 24-hour period, not just "page hits".)
That's a whole lot of growth! The good news is,
Cisco Connection Online is growing and scaling just
as the book says. The principles and philosophies behind
Internet business and Web site design are the key to
what you can find in the book. With the Internet, that's
key, because the technologies are often changing, and
the numbers will continue to grow over the next years.
p.p.s. Enjoy!
