Turning on the lights in your online business
Fri, Jun 1 2007

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Whenever I do talks or seminars about eBusiness one of the fundamental themes I focus on is that business is all about relationships and the way you interact with customers and suppliers. That may sound so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, but when people do business online it's very easy to forget real-world wisdom and allow the experience of doing business to become very impersonal and disconnected. You wouldn't set up a bricks-and-mortar shop and then hire shop assistants who hide out the back and refuse to talk to customers. And you certainly wouldn't set up a shop and then leave it unattended, expecting your customers to look after themselves and not be able to ask any questions about your products.

But that's exactly how most online businesses are run. Ecommerce websites are typically set up as if they were just glorified catalogs: a list of products, some pictures, brief descriptions, and an order form. No human interaction at all.

One reason for this is that most site owners have no way to see what visitors are doing. It's as if your website is a wall between you and your customers, with you working to make the wall as pretty as possible and customers doing whatever it is they do on the other side with an occasional order popping into your inbox. Sure, there are plenty of analytics systems around that give you insight into customer behavior either individually or collectively, but they're mostly retrospective rather than real-time.

Let me explain it with an analogy.

Imagine you built a store on Main Street and stocked it with products. You don't put any staff in the store, just an automatic checkout system that lets people pay for products as they leave. Then you sit back and wait. People go into the store but you can't see what they do while they're in there: all you know is that most of the time people leave empty handed, but sometimes they decide to buy something and they pay for it on the way out. You get a report on what people have bought so you know what has been sold, but that's it. Your store is basically a sealed black box and you can't see what happens inside.

That's the stage that the majority of eBusinesses operate at, and it's pretty pathetic. No real-world store owner would be satisfied with that approach.

The first step to improving things is to try to work out what people are doing while they are in the store. Do they have trouble finding things? Do they get lost? Are the shelves and aisles set up optimally? So to answer these questions you could have cameras installed in your store that record what people do, and at the end of each week you could review the footage to see what happened and which aisles people walked down. You could generate statistical reports such as "most popular aisles", and "products that are most picked up but not purchased", and "ratio of purchases to aisle visitors". Then you can use this information to rearrange your store to try to improve things, wait a while, review the next lot of footage and see if things are better or worse. Rinse and repeat. It's store presentation optimisation by statistics.

That's basically what you are doing by using website traffic reports or analytics software to review the behavior of visitors to your website and make adjustments. It's still treating your shop as an unattended black box, but at least you have some idea what people do while they are in the box.

However, it's certainly not engaging with them on a personal level as you would expect in a well-run store. Potential customers are still left to their own devices and have to find things for themselves. In a real store that just wouldn't be acceptable, but it's considered to be absolutely normal for online businesses. Go to just about any online store today and you'll find there's no way to get live assistance: the best you can hope for is a "contact us" form or an email address with the promise that they'll get back to you within a day or so. Imagine if you went to Main Street and into a store, and the only way you could ask a question was by putting a form in a box then coming back the next day for an answer. Not exactly stellar customer service!

So the concept that I emphasize in my talks and seminars is that when you run an eBusiness you have to realise that a typical website blocks your interaction with potential customers when it should be enhancing it. Your whole objective should be to draw customers into a closer relationship with you and to communicate on multiple levels via multiple channels, and your website is just one of those channels. It shouldn't be the only one and it definitely shouldn't act as an anonymizing wall between you and your customers.

One way to break through the "unattended store" problem is by offering live chat or phone-back services through your site.

A live-chat service involves placing a link or image on your website that visitors can click to open a real-time chat session with you. At your end you run a piece of software that alerts you immediately when a website visitor clicks the link, and a window pops up that lets you type messages to each other. For the website visitor it's like having shop assistants standing by to answer any questions they may have rather than being required to submit questions on a form with a 24-hour turnaround. They can interact with you directly, which of course is exactly what you want!

An example of a business that uses this technology is Lulu, the publisher that is handling the Second Edition of "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" (due out in about a week, by the way!). The Lulu website has all the usual online support and FAQ pages, but their support page at www.lulu.com/help also has a "Live Help" link that triggers a real-time chat session with Lulu staff. A couple of weeks ago when I was going through the process of reviewing proofs for book I had questions about a couple of technical issues, and using their Live Help system I could get answers on the spot right there while viewing the proofs online. Instead of being a lifeless source of static information it turns the Lulu website into a two-way communications medium and made me a very happy customer.

The Live Help system used by Lulu comes from LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) and has a bunch of other features such as a real-time view of what visitors are doing in your site. By running the Operator Console software you can sit back and watch as site visitors progress through different pages on your site: it's like walking through your store and seeing what your customers are doing *right* *now*, rather than just reading end-of-week statistics on which aisles were most popular.

Another technique to break down the barrier is to use a call-back system on your website. What this does is put a "talk to us now" link on your site with a text box where site visitors can enter their phone number. The system then automatically places two phone calls: one to the site visitor and one to you as the site owner, and links the calls together. Your phone will ring, the site visitor's phone rings, and when you both pick up you'll be talking directly to each other just as if one of you phoned the other. Sure, you can put your phone number on your website (and you should!) so that visitors can call you, but very few actually will if they have to pick up their phone and dial you. Making it so easy that they can receive a call from you by clicking a button on your website can increase your customer contact rate dramatically.

Those two tools are just a couple of the techniques you can use to break down the wall between yourself and your potential customers. The critical thing is to change your mindset so that instead of just publishing static information you really focus on how to make your relationship with your customers direct and personal.