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ATG COMMERCE SERVICE CENTER
A New Offering with Very Good Operational Functionality and Roles But Limited Analytics
By Mitchell I. Kramer, March 13, 2008
NETTING IT OUT
Sometimes customers need your help to perform
ecommerce activities. They’d
like to escalate from self-service to assisted-service in order to complete
their work. We call that help assisted-service for ecommerce.
ATG Commerce Service Center is ATG’S
assisted-service for ecommerce offering. CSC was introduced in June 2007
and is available as one of the separately-priced
modules of the ATG Service suite, all of which are add-ons to, and tightly
integrated with ATG Commerce. To date, ATG claims that approximately 20 customer
accounts have purchased CSC.
On the PSGroup Report Card for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce, ATG Commerce
Service Center exceeds requirements for roles and operational functionality.
It needs improvement in channel support and analytic functionality.
With qualification, we recommend ATG CSC to every organization that has implemented
ATG Commerce as the mechanism for delivering assisted-service and a cross-channel
customer experience for ecommerce. The qualification is for the lack of packaged
reports in the current product version to help you analyze and refine your
assisted-service ecommerce experience. For those organizations in the process
of selecting an ecommerce platform, ATG CSC makes ATG Commerce a more attractive
choice.
ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE
Helping Your Customers Explore, Select, and Purchase Your Products and Services
In our customer service research and consulting
practice, we talk about cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service.
By cross-lifecycle, we mean that customers
want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, from their
initial contact with you through their retirement. By cross-channel, we’ve
meant that customers want your help on every channel through which they interact
with you—the Web and email for self-service, your contact center,
stores, and your field service force for assisted-service.
Ecommerce systems use the Web self-service
channel to let customers perform activities within the “explore, select, purchase, and maintain” lifecycle
phases. They’re your self-service Web marketing and sales application.
Most commonly, ecommerce systems let customers learn about your products,
compare them, configure them, price them, buy them, and even return them.
Ecommerce systems also have account management capabilities. Your customers
create ecommerce accounts in order to register their payment methods, shipping
methods, and name and address in order to pay for and receive your products.
In Table A, we list these activities within each lifecycle phase in a little
more detail.
Customer Ecommerce Activities
(Please download the formatted PDF to see the table at http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr03-13-08cc.)
Table A. Typical ecommerce activities that customers perform are listed in
this table within their lifecycle phase.
Customers Need Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
Sometimes, customers need assisted-service
to perform these activities. For example, your ecommerce system may be missing
important services or content
around the products in which they’re interested such as the detailed
description and configurator for a brand-new bundle. Or you don’t provide
content about replacements and compatibility for products that you’re
about to discontinue. Or you don’t let them change their username
online.
At other times, customers need assisted-service
because they have difficulty using your ecommerce facilities to perform these
activities. For example,
they can’t find they product they want to buy by using their terminology
in your ecommerce search service. Or your product descriptions don’t
include the information critical to their selection approach like laundering
instructions. Or they’re confused by the wording of your “two
for” promotion. Or your account registration form has a field that
they don’t understand.
At still other times, customers need assisted-service
because they can’t
or won’t use the Web to do business with you. Telephone assisted-service
with your agents is their preferred or only available channel.
Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications
The best approach to assisted-service for ecommerce
is multi-channel ecommerce applications that support Web self-service and
Web chat and contact center
assisted-service. Multi-channel ecommerce applications should provide role-based
access to the data and services that agents need in order to perform the
activities for which customers need assisted-service. For example, the
customer service agent role should provide the service that lets agents view
and update
the product, quantity, price, payment, or shipping of any order item of
any customer’s order. It should also provide a service that lets agents
view and offer any of the promotions that you’ve created for a particular
product. In addition, multi-channel ecommerce provides role-based access
to additional assisted-service capabilities such as changing prices, authorizing
returns, and making accommodations.
Extending ecommerce to multiple channels can have bottom-line impact, reducing
costs and increasing revenue and making assisted-service for ecommerce a
critical component of your customer experience.
Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications Have Recently Become Available
Recently, ecommerce suppliers have recognized
requirements for multi-channel ecommerce. They’ve expanded the channel support and the customer service
functionality of their offerings to implement the assisted-service for ecommerce
that we’ve just described. They offer assisted-service “in the
box” as an add-on feature or via integration with an external assisted-service
product.
• If your ecommerce supplier offers assisted-service
capabilities, then you should seriously consider their implementation in
your ecommerce system.
• If you are evaluating new or replacement
ecommerce applications, then support for multi-channel ecommerce should be
a critical evaluation and selection factor.
We’ve extended our framework for evaluating
ecommerce products to help you make your selection and implementation decisions.
The framework is presented
and discussed in the next section of this report.
EVALUATING ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
We’ve adapted and combined our frameworks
for ecommerce and for cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service to
create a framework for assisted-service
for ecommerce. The top-level criteria of this evaluation framework are listed
and described below. The top-level criteria and sub-criteria are shown graphically
in Illustration 1.
PSGroup Evaluation Framework for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria
of the PSGroup evaluation framework for assisted-service for ecommerce.
• ROLES AND OPERATIONAL FUNCTIONALITY. Operational functionality makes
up the ecommerce activities that your customer service agents can perform on
behalf
of your customers. In our evaluation of operational functionality for assisted-service
for ecommerce systems, we assess the lifecycle activities a product supports
and the customer roles that can perform those activities.
• CHANNEL SUPPORT. Assisted-service can be delivered across a range of
channels. While telephone communication via the contact center is the obvious
assisted-service
channel, other channels like Web chat are also important. For channel support,
we examine which channels a product supports.
• ANALYTIC FUNCTIONALITY. You need to be able to measure, analyze, and
refine the assisted-service that your agents deliver. Within analytic functionality,
we examine and evaluate the collection and presentation of agent behavior
and
performance information.
• ARCHITECTURE. In architecture, we examine the implementation of an assisted-service
for ecommerce product in order to evaluate its integrated with your existing
ecommerce and customer service systems.
• PRODUCT VIABILITY. This evaluation criterion allows us to assess the
business and risk in implementing an assisted-service for ecommerce product.
•
COMPANY VIABILITY. Where product viability examines product-oriented risk factors,
company viability examines risk factors with the product’s supplier.
We will use this framework to evaluate ATG Commerce Service Center.
This report continues...
To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr03-13-08cc
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