IT Week: What does your job as vice president of product strategy at e-commerce software firm ATG entail?
Barry Coleman: I spend a lot of time talking to customers about their problems and then looking at how that could fit with the technology and if we have a feature set that could solve them. As our customers try to grow revenue, reduce costs and improve the consumer experience, I’m looking at what technology ATG could bring into the mix to enable this.

What are the main challenges that your customers face?
One of the main issues is delivering personalisation. We spend an awful lot of time automating personalisation ­ firms are really trying to ramp up the potential for revenue so they want these processes automated. On the other side is the customer experience. Often when customers go from the web to the call centre they end up having to repeat certain processes. We recently put out a product designed to make the call centre an extension of the web site.

Why is this so important?
We see call centre operatives as an extension of the web site. The agent should be able to see everything that’s online. We’re really starting to see multi-channel efforts. There may be five- or six-times more things that can’t be stocked in store so firms are making the site the vehicle to find items and then make it a seamless experience. You should be able to go to a store and have three items in hand you want to buy and two more [you’ve found online] and be able to purchase them together.

Has the advent of Web 2.0 technologies changed e-commerce?
Yes, it’s all about a rich user experience ­ an area we’re driving towards. We’re using Ajax to ease the checkout process because a lot of dropouts occur here. It can help to give the customer the information they need at the right time. Also, if you’re choosing a product and there are several variables, it allows firms to show only those in stock: as you make selections it can make quick calls to the back end and not allow the customer to pick something that cannot be fulfilled. It can also enable single-page checkouts, with expandable sections allowing users to fill in all their information without having to leave the page.

What e-commerce trends will we see in the future?
Bringing the right products to the right people at the right time and helping people get to the right channel will be important. Soon you will see more click-to-call and click-to-chat technologies and more collaboration. For example, if a pair of friends live two time zones away from each other but like to shop together, let’s give them the tools to do that, and then use the information for product suggestions.