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