There is no doubt that offering real-time interaction is providing a ‘step change’ in e-tailers’ customer service and revolutionising the personalisation of the relationship between the two. By Steve Goodheart

Technically it is becoming much easier and more cost effective to talk to the online customer in real-time or offer an instant phone or email back response system. The trend is growing and will rightly become a key point of difference for successful retailers in the future.Retailers must beware however, that the technology doesn’t make the customer feel uneasy and isn’t perceived as being too intrusive rather than helping to engage them.

Smart technology can allow online retailers to sense when a frustrated customer is about to prematurely abandon a transaction by monitoring as they click-through pages and giving them a pop-up ‘Click to Call’ option when their movement stops.Some websites even go one step further – providing a message at the optimum moment from a real-life customer service operator, poised and ready to interact with the customer, guiding them towards a purchase.

However, many online customers are technology novices and you can almost picture them looking around the room, startled, wondering who is watching them. They feel unnerved – and that Big Brother moment could be enough to make them leave the site.The other major challenge with personalisation is when it goes wrong. Amazon, for example, suggests options to buy based on previous purchases – but imagine how disconcerting that could be if you keep being advised to buy kitchen equipment simply because you’ve bought a new coffee grinder for your mother-in-law’s birthday?

Golf is my passion – not cooking – but Amazon doesn’t know it – and that is the kind of thing that can put off potential purchasers. I believe the most customer-friendly use of personalised interaction comes at the most important part of the online purchasing experience – the check-out, when customers are most likely to have a genuine need for help.Just as a customer in a traditional store looks for an assistant when they have a problem, they also welcome real-time help when they are having trouble using their credit card whilst trying to buy online.

A real-time pop-up option offering to guide them towards a solution is a genuine customer service and helps convert some of online retail’s 65 per cent of abandoned baskets into sales.For those customers who do want to maximise interaction with a product or brand, the new twist in e-commerce is using open Id’s, such as Facebook Connect. Using one simple log-in for a wide variety of sites is very consumer friendly and allows e-tailers to benefit from the pool of information gathered as the customer travels around the web.

They can direct purchases back to their Facebook mini-feed where they can share experiences, comments and reviews with others if they want to. The key, just as in traditional stores, is to give the customer what they want – and don’t fuss over them like an over-enthusiastic sales assistant.

Steve Goodheart, partner at Transaction Partnership

e-pay news