Customer Reviews

Customer Service on the Internet

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of the most unpredictable things the Internet achieved was to re-define customer service. One of the first people to notice and to write a book about how to do it in the mid-1990s was Jim Sterne. It's just been updated in this second edition.

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 naļve-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.

This is a good basic book to have on Internet customer service. I've been on the Internet side of customer service for 4 years now and find the insight Sterne provides well thought out. Some of the material is dated, as we service now moves at Internet speed.

[Attention: Bias alert. I've been interviewed in this book, and my company was highlighted in the case-study, so of course it would be nice to have it sell as many copies as possible. At the same time, neither I nor my employer were compensated for the work, nor did we subsidize its publication. I just helped out because I thought it was cool, and to see these ideas reach print.]

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!

It gives a framework to progressively implement customer service in a web site in which different techniques are positioned. Practical approach with multiple examples and cases. More important to me, it facilitates thinking in terms of how the customers view the web site. Excellent.

This book is a good one for guiding you how to use the Internet for customer service. It gives details of how to set up a well published site that customers will be able to easily view and interact with. Well written

One of a very limited number of titles, as far as Internet customer service is concerned, a good starting point for throwing up ideas, although I felt it lacked a basic frame for somebody who was new to the net and looking to establish customer service procedures. As with any text written about technology, one would have to question how current the information was, although I apreciate this would be out of the control of the author. My only other problem was that I thought allot of time was dedicated to the interests of large firms, for example a big section was dedicated to setting up and monitoring disscusion groups, important and usefull sources of information yes, but not a realistic part of a website for a small company, more your major computer business etc. All in all though considering the limited number of titles available, (about two as I write this, including this one) if you have a spare £20 its better than nothing!

As a historical snapshot this book is great. Written in 2000, it captures the vibe of the late 90's dotcom period well. The sense of excitement, possible new busines models, and latest quotes from experts (all dated to the day in 1999) really took me back.

What this book didn't do was give me a sense of how online customer care operates (and can operate) in 2008. The illustrations of web pages and technologies in the book only served to show me how much things have moved on in the last 9 years. While the principles of customer contact are timeless, this book is seriously dated. If, like me, you are looking for a book that identifies what the current state of online customer contact is, and how things might evolve going forward, then this book is way past it's use by date.

I have read the other Jim's book, 'WWW Marketing Integrating Your Marketing Strategy ..' the only handbook for Internet Marketing. This book is a perfect sequel for that. You can read this book alone, it's very worth, or you can read this book together as a pair of the greatest Internet Marketing book ever published.
And the other thing which makes this book becomes so fascinating, is the reality that this book will work not only in the region with 'sophisticated internet' likes USA, but it will work in the 'emerging internet' regions like my country, Indonesia, as well .....
I recommend this book for everyone who has a bright vision about the Internet, and the mighty potential inside it.

-- Absolutely The Greatest !!!

Edy M. Prawono
Multicom Cyber Media Inc., Marketing Director.
Sistelindo Mitralintas/Indonesian IBM Global Network, Senior Advisor.
http://www.cyberdia.com

Having seen Jim's presentations at Internet World, this book is a natural extension of his talent: improving how customers view your company on the Net. Not limited exclusively to theory, Jim mixes real-life examples with result-producing solutions that are easy to implement. You'll hear yourself saying, "Gee, I should have thought of that." (Surprising, a lot of his ideas are things that every business, regardless of whether or not it is on the net, should be doing.)

In addition, Jim has a great personality translated in his writing. Every page turns itself. He spends enough time on a topic to be effective but doesn't over-due any single idea.

Here it is, in plain English, the secrets that have made companies successful.

has wide info about customer service in internet. but not exactly what i'm looking: how to build customer service web based application. but the book gave me some insight on situation around servicing customer in internet.