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Online Customer Service 97
they have questions regarding the billing issues, receipts and the checkout process.
Moreover, after ordering the products, they have to be able to learn about the status
of order. In addition, after the customers receive the product, they have to be
provided with the information regarding the product setup and product returns
(Bernett, 2000).
Several tools are currently used in assisting customers online. These are: E-
Mail, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Co-Browsing (Escorted Browsing),
Application Sharing, Text-Based Chat, Video-Conferencing, Voice Over the
Internet Protocol (VOIP), and online customer service agents (Lucent Technologies).
E-mail is the most common and the easiest form of communication on the web
at present. This method is usually preferred since the customer does not need a
special hardware to send and receive e-mails. Web-based mail applications let the
user to send and receive e-mails without using special software. . There are more
advantages on the customer side with regard to using e-mail. First, the customer can
send e-mail anytime. Another advantage is that it is much more convenient writing
a quick e-mail than going through a telephone queue and being transferred among
customer service agents.
Because of these factors of convenience, websites begin to receive thousands
of e-mails everyday. However, dealing with a big load of e-mail has been
problematic for most of the websites. A study by Jupiter Communications reviewed
125 leading web sites. It sent them relevant consumer questions by e-mail to see
the response time of the websites. Forty-two percent of the sites never responded
to the e-mail, took more than five days in responding or simply they did not have
an e-mail address on their site for customer service purposes (Romeo, 1999).
There are a number of technologies used to sort out the e-mails in order to achieve
a higher response time and these will be discussed later in the study.
Frequently asked questions are the questions that are routinely asked by
customers on a specific site. These questions can be handled in three possible ways.
The first one is to place a frequently asked questions and answers area on the
website so that a customer can look at that web page before contacting the
customer service. The second way is to e-mail a preconfigured template document
to the customer. The third way is to use an auto responder. These methods are
effective, however it makes it hard to follow-up with the customers to see if they
were satisfied with the service (Hunter, 1998).
Co-Browsing (Escorted Browsing), Application Sharing, Text-Based Chat,
Voice Over the Internet Protocol (VOIP), Video-Conferencing, and online
customer service agents all use live help in order to assist the customers. Co-
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