E-traders need better supporters

The news that online support sometimes leaves customers disappointed won't be a big surprise to anyone who has used such "help" for online shopping. But IT professionals who work on these services should consider the consequences of such failings.

This is one conclusion after reading a recent survey of e-buyers by customer support software company Transversal. In fact, the feedback was rather extreme: apparently retailers have a "catastrophic inability" to provide adequate online customer service, and most firms are unable to provide answers to even the simplest queries ... Ouch, tell us what you really think why don't you?

Cost-conscious operations such as Ryanair.com make no secret of the fact that an email to them will take quite a while to get answered. Usually it's a deliberate policy to get you onto the (in Ryanair's case) £1 a minute support line. Which probably explains the 60 percent of travel companies reported in the research who do not bother to answer email queries at all.

Then there are sites that make it as hard as possible to email or call for any answers, forcing punters to go through Q&A lists. This is great for the firms as they don't need to spend on many support staff. But it assumes they can guess their customer's problems in advance. Which they can't.

Finally there are the call centres where the staff may know nothing about the customer or the client's business and cannot answer any question beyond the script provided. I've even come across call-centre staff who have said they are just a person in a call centre and that is why the service is incompetent. Hardly the way to present a professional service.

Maybe the diversity of approaches is part of the problem. And maybe suppliers of customer service should be clearer about what they are trying to do and why. That might require them to agree codes of practice for how customers are supported.

For example, perhaps retailers should accept that the cost of supporting customer questions must be built into the cost of the product, not charged though a premium rate phone line. Otherwise customers are paying extra for the failure to deal with the problem in the first place, and in these days of malware and diallers, there are many customers who cannot call premium rate lines at all as they have been blocked.

As IT professionals, it's easy to concentrate on the mechanics of systems delivery and forget why we do these things in the first place. This report could act as a sanity check to remind us that however great our e-commerce services may be technically, we'll always be judged by the way we treat customers when they are trying to solve a problem.