eCommerce and

Recently, we had some interns helping us review our policy pages. Overall both I and the interns thought it was a pretty interesting project and we will certainly be making some necessary changes to our policies. Specific changes include: making our policies more readable, more user friendly, and displaying the most valuable information in an easy to read layout.

Before we set out on this project we knew that our policies had not been updated in a while, and we were interested in how we stacked up against competitors and other Internet retailers.  We focused on what was displayed in others policies, the terms of their policies and how strictly they where enforced. We also paid particular attention to what was enforced and why some policies seemed more flexible than others, and of those policies which ones were clear sticking points for merchants. With that in mind we decided that our onslaught of interns would be perfect for the job of researching website policies and providing us with some recommendations.

Throughout the entire process I had to combat the question, "who reads the policies anyways?” and I had to explain that it’s true, most people do not read the policies, upfront.  What the interns needed to understand was that the policies contain essential pieces of information which need to be made public and available to our users regardless of what point in the buying cycle the customer decides to read or review them. While someone may not care what the returns process is upfront, you know they certainly care if they get the wrong product, a damaged product or simply do not like what they ordered. Clear and concise information regarding how to contact us, answers to common questions, order status, return a product, terms of use, privacy information etc., needs to be available.

Having this information is not only important, legally, but it is also important to keep transparency between our staff and consumers.  When imperative information is made public upfront it ensures that we are properly servicing our customers and in turn giving them the ability to serve themselves.

An interesting thing happened at the Gordian Project this Christmas. We had Christmas shoppers! This may not sound too startling, considering Christmas just passed, but this year's Christmas crowd was different from years passed. In March of 2008, Gordian Project launched OutdoorPros.com. This Christmas, with OutdoorPros.com, we've uncovered some really great opportunities for good solutions.

For a few years, with PlumberSurplus.com, we had successfully navigated Christmas shopping without too much disruption to normal work and without the need to significantly augment our staffing or resources in customer service. With the addition of OutdoorPros.com, however, we were facing an entirely new animal. I have worked in retail before. I remember the days when I worked at the Gateway Country store selling computers to people who lined up like cows at Christmas. It was busy, it was crazy, and gifts flew out the door. But customers that came into our store at least knew that when our door was closed, we couldn't be much help to them. Even though Gateway was, at the time, a multichannel retailer, I didn't see much in the way of integration of the different customer bases (online vs. walk-in traffic). The customers’ expectations were, I'm sure, very different about how Christmas gift orders should be handled. This year, with OutdoorPros.com, we learned about the customer expectation during a busy holiday on a site that offers more gift-oriented wares.

PlumberSurplus.com gets busier in November and December with folks dressing up their homes to be ready for Christmas. We also sell some items that could be gift items, like a nice shower head  or a towel warmer or a nice drill/saw combo. But, for some reason, PlumberSurplus.com customers seem to plan really well for the holiday. OutdoorPros.com customers, on the other hand, have a very different up front expectation. Customers want a really great deal, they want to know what is in stock or what the lead time is going to be.  They want to know when it will ship and how long it will take to get to them, they want tracking information when it ships, or a backorder update when it doesn't ship.  They want it to be guaranteed because it's a Christmas gift. These are completely reasonable expectations and, for us, really great opportunities to improve. If you control 100% of your inventory and fulfillment, envisioning solutions to these customer needs are easily in focus. If, however, you control only some or none of your inventory and fulfillment and rely on strategic partners, and you haven't worked out solutions to the above customer pains, you may be due for some lumps around Christmas.

Also, our volume of inquiries for our OutdoorPros.com property easily quadrupled for the six weeks leading up to Christmas. It was not unexpected that our volume would balloon, but we didn't expect the kind of volume we were getting in terms of customer inquiries. It's a week into January 2009 and I can see our inquiry volume back at October levels. Concurrent with our unexpected explosion of the volume of inquiries were some staffing issues. We had some personnel changes for various reasons. A number of factors contributed to a poor staffing situation and we ended up providing a poor customer experience to a number of customers who had to wait extra time for a reply to voicemails and emails (this is my public apology... I am truly sorry to any and all that were forced to wait.). We did come together as a team and even pulled some resources from other departments to get the job done, but it's no excuse for not properly resourcing the customer service department during the busiest time of year. It's not easy to find and train qualified reps in a short amount of time, so we should have done this long before.

We found that when working with customers whose orders were filled by one of our strategic partners, we hadn't planned well enough for meeting the above customer needs on those orders. This coupled with our poor resourcing of the customer service department and we had not prepared well for a busier-than-expected Christmas season. I will chalk it up to "lesson learned" and plan for the extreme rush for our next Christmas season. This is going to be especially important as we expand our offering and even launch new sites with more gift-oriented products.

In light of the Christmas season just passing, my customer service team and I experienced a high volume of unhappy and "angry" customers.
   
The majority of the customer frustrations came from last minute shopping. Orders were placed with the expectation that the products would be received on a specific day. To the surprise of the customer some items would not be in stock and some would even be on back order, due to the amount of popular items being purchased. As you can imagine, when customers found out the item(s) on their order were not in stock, the typical response was "This was a Christmas gift, and you guys have messed it up."
 
In our customer service department we strive to do the best with what tools we have and what has been made available to us. Everyone works their hardest and to the best of their ability. But we have all realized that in the online world of shopping, to customers, a lot of times that is not good enough. Customers who shop online seem to have a higher expectation of great customer service, and every year the bar they set seems to rise.  I hate to see unhappy customers and I sometimes want to let them know that their situation could have been avoided if they would have just read the description of the product, read our shipping and returns policies and planned their orders appropriately.  Yet, in the midst of their dismay I don’t say these things because in all honesty I really do want to make them happy and hopefully resolve whatever issue they may be encountering.

As a customer service representative, at times it can become very stressful and discouraging when you are continually dealing with "angry" or "unhappy" customers, day after day. I mean regardless of how many customers that amounts to every week, even if it is only one, that customer situation sticks with you far longer than the customer that emails to say “thank you”.  Its human nature and it can be hard to shake off.  Here at Gordian Project all of our reps have taken this challenge in stride, and they do their best, every time, to help the customer as much as they can. We see it as an area to improve and do better, if we did not, we would eventually become defeated. Not just as a company and department, but emotionally as well.
 
I have wondered how many of our actual customers read our blog, especially the customer service section? There are plenty of articles written on what a customer should look out for when making an online purchase, but not many that give tips on actually planning your purchases.  After making a list of the most common complaints and frustrations our customer’s experience, I thought I would write down a few ways of avoiding such frustrations.  I settled on a list of a few tips for any consumer who is considering making an online purchase, especially a purchase that will be needed by a certain date.
 
Tip 1:
 
Keep track of your account information and log in to check order status. Most websites, including ours, make it easy for you to see the status of your order by simply logging in to an account. A lot of customers get angry waiting on hold to check status of their order and do not realize they can find it themselves by logging into their account.
 
Tip 2:
 
Call centers experience high call volumes, especially during the holidays, even with increased staffing. As a consumer, if you are unable to get through, leave a voicemail, and you will generally be called back within one business day. Many customers get upset because they continue to hold, or instead try to continually call, hang up and keep calling back. If you do not need an immediate answer and can wait a business day, leaving a voicemail will save you call and wait time.
 
Tip 3:
 
Using our LivePerson live chat feature is one of our greatest tools. Customers can chat with an online rep who will assist them in real time and in the same exact way a rep will on the phones. Many customers think they must speak to someone on the phone to get an answer, when in reality they will get the same exact service via our live chat feature.
 
Tip 4:
 
I would say this is my greatest tip to any customer, whether you are our customer or shopping elsewhere. Read the returns policy.
 
I will admit I never really read or paid attention to any company's or stores return policy until I started working here. You can bet that I do now, and I actually do read them, even if I only scan through the important points.
 
I would say a good percentage of our customers fail to read our returns policy, this creates stress and trouble for not only the customer but the representative as well. We want to help customers in any way we can, but in all reality, there are policies we have to stick to.
 
It makes us very happy and encourages us when a customer calls and says, I read your return policy which states "X, Y, and Z", is there anything you can do for me? This shows the customer understands our policies and is asking for some type of exception. At which point we try and do what we can to help them or come to a solution that favors both the company and customer. As a customer please understand there are some policies we simply cannot break or make an exception to, but we will try our best. This is why it is always best to read companies return policy.

There are definitely areas that retailers can improve on, us included, but as someone who sees both sides of the equation as an online consumer and an online customer service representative, it is my hope that these tips not only assist the consumer but the customer service representative as well.

Lately over here at the Surplus we’ve been focused on a lot of internal development to better streamline our processes, interactions with customers and suppliers, and other types of projects that add value to us as an organization but remain invisible to our customers. However, we have been looking ahead to this year’s development projects and have plans to do a lot of work on what we call “Customer Experience”.

With this focus, I’ve been poking around, looking for ideas and the technologies that may support some of the cooler features we may want to implement. In a post Web 2.0 world, we are looking for things that really add value to the customer, not just every cool little gadget, widget or flashy thing that might look cool.

One topic that has been particular warm in the online developer community as of late is the pros and cons of the new interactivity features as well as the tools used to develop them (read: AJAX, JQuery, javascript). In an effort to make the web work much more like a desktop application, developers are using more and more sophisticated techniques to push data back and forth without the user noticing. This provides much more real time feedback to the user, as well as adds a lot of functionality and makes interacting with the internet a lot more convenient with fewer time-wasting page reloads.

Take, for example, a familiar concept I’m sure you’ve seen and used yourself, what we call the “Product Selector”, where a user can choose a high level product they want to purchase, such as a bathtub, and using various slider bars, checkboxes, and other mechanisms, narrow down the result set to see the products that match their filtering criteria. BlueNile.com has used this for their diamond search for a long time. Product selectors like this are often very helpful and kind of fun to use. It increases customer retention and gives customers the ability to really find what they are looking for, or better yet, shows them a range of products that meet their criteria. However, there are drawbacks to the product selectors, including the inability for Google to crawl your products that are only accessible through the selector, the inability to have direct links to filtered results, and the ability to build a tool that the customer finds intuitive and helpful.

One big problem web-developers face in this post web 2.0 world is finding the balance between cool and functional. There is a fine line between enhancing a customer’s experience and frustrating the heck out of them. What is intuitive for a developer may seem obtuse to a customer (I’m pretty sure the developer is right though).

You can make a web page take you through 5 steps to create an account, choose your options, confirm your purchase, and agree to the terms, all in one single, seamless AJAX-enabled application. That is, until they realize they want to ship it to Aunt Gertrude instead, click their browser’s back button, and lose all the information they’ve entered, frustrating them to the point of abandoning the process.

Many of these new technologies break the expectations of the browser’s back button and bookmarks. Often these technologies can completely block search engine’s ability to find relevant data on your site. Often a page refresh or other unexpected action can cause the user to lose their place and what they were doing.

As a fan of emerging web technologies, I am looking forward to tackling some of these challenges in the coming year. However, I will be sure to be on the lookout for the unexpected consequences of clever web development.

So stay tuned, keep hitting F5, and look for some new features coming soon!

Happy New Year all!  I am out for the rest of the week so the variety is early.  There are some new posts that I wanted to share, but in addition to that let’s take a look at some of our favorite posts, top stories, and some of the biggest developments in the industry from 2008.

• Google Product Search up 786% in the category of shopping search.
• The Silicon Alley Insider reports on Digg’s revenue losses and why ad targeting, or the lack there of, could be a major factor in these losses.
• Have your 2009 wish list ready for Google?  I know Zach does and Matt Cutts’ parents do, but submissions are coming in fast so add yours soon.
• Jennifer Laycock released her second installment of “Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy”, but I recommend starting from her first post on the subject.
• A legend about the inventor of chess may provide insight into internet retail growth.

2008 In Review

• Election news spreads and bloggers highlighted Super Tuesday.
• eBay jolts sellers by changing fees.
• eCommerce celebrates its 25th birthday.
• OutdoorPros.com launches!
• Mercado rebrands one month and then sells to Omniture a few months later.
• April Fools jokes get better and better every year so it would seem.
• eBay adds a merchant dashboard so sellers can track best match search placement.
• Amazon goes down!
• PCI updates Data Security Standards, again.
  
• The iPhone is released.
• Google adds shopping list to Product Search.
  
• The Top 100 Web Celebrities is announced.
• Yahoo and Google team up.
• Brian gives a lesson on forecasting.
  
• Amazon is finally able to ship Kindle.
• Big companies continue to try and squash the little guy.
• Vanessa, yeah that’s me talking in the 3rd person, goes on a rant about employee responsibility.
• The Olympics!
• Google News causes a 75% drop in United Airlines stock.
• Bill Gates retires from daily role at Microsoft.  Little did we know the extra free time would be spent with Jerry Seinfeld.
• Spore, the most copyright protected game, also becomes the most pirated game.
• Barack Obama becomes the first “Internet President”.
• Macy’s requires online shoppers to “wait in line”.
• Reputation management becomes increasingly important as social networking becomes more popular.
• Internet retailers have to respond to declining economic conditions.

• The Internet star rises in a down economy
• E-commerce on the move
• How the Supreme Court Fractured Online Pricing
• Retail Explorer
• We-commerce
• The Power of Customer Reviews
• Advantage: Amazon
• Merchandise sold on eBay falls 1%, the first decline in company history
• Exit Strategy
• Target.com supports site design for blind people under legal settlement

I know this couldn't possibly be everything, which events in 2008 were most memorable to you?

Our Returns Policy provides customers with information on how to request a Return Merchandise Authorization [RMA], how to return a product, etc.  One of the most overlooked sections in our policy is our “Basic RMA Policies” which states that “returns must meet all applicable criteria”.  It later goes on to say: “RMAs must be valid, unexpired, and issued for the product being returned”.  We then go on to explain timeframes and acceptable shipping methods.

Recently a customer returned an item that was received incorrectly, but exceeded our approved timeline, and so their return was refused. I was later asked to review the customer’s RMA and rethink our set timeframes and associated policies in order to improve in the area of customer experience.  In an effort to see where we stand as opposed to other major retailers I began to review our returns criteria and compare it to that of others.  According to consumer world we are more consumer friendly than most of the major retailers reviewed.  This brings me to my next point…

Where do we draw the line between our company responsibility and that of the customers’? As I reviewed the RMA it was clear that we did all we could to get the item back. The customer requested an RMA, and in less than an hour received an acceptance email informing them to refer to our Returns Policies before returning the item. The next morning the customer was sent a return label so that they would not incur return shipping costs [which was never used]. Exactly a month after the accepted RMA email was sent to the customer, they returned the package, which was refused by our warehouse. It is the customer’s responsibility to get the product back to us within the specified timeline, and it is our responsibility to do the best we can to help customers with that process.

It is important to note that if the customer had called our Customer Service department to inform us that they were late in returning their item, the RMA may have been approved for return despite the required timeframe.  We strive to give our customers the best experience we can offer. However, there are times when all we can do is assist our customers, and let them do the rest. We will be reviewing different ways of improving our RMA timeframe; for now we hope that customers will understand that we want to help them as much as we can, but in the end we can only help them as much as they allow us to do so.

I encourage feedback and comments from others dealing with similar issues.  When should we meet the customer in the middle and when does it become completely unprofitable to do so?  According to Maxim Mironov’s Optimalogica blog “1 % returns costs you 0.45 % of sales”.  What is even more interesting is the question he then poses “On $10 million sales 1 % returns increase means $45,000 lost in costs. At 4.5 % margin to off-set this loss you need $1 million extra sales. Are you getting this much because of a nicer policy?”  While these numbers may not match ours perfectly it is good to understand that even with a good returns policy we aren’t able to make everyone happy.  We just have to decide if that is something we are ok with and if the dollars make sense.

If you’re in retail I doubt you’ve had time to catch up on this week’s blog highlights.  I found these particularly interesting this week:

• Search Engine Marketers, I suggest reading Search Engine Land’s post on 9 Myths of Landing Page Quality Score.
• It’s the giving season, and bloggers are doing their part.  Brian Smith of Comparison Shopping Engines is growing a mustache to raise money for DonorsChoose, an organization that lets teachers submit projects they need funding for, if you are interested you can go to his giving page at ComparisonEngines.com.  Joe Hall proposes linking to charities to improve their web presence.  Finally, if you Twitter give Squidoo a tweet and they will donate to charity as well.
• Rand from SEOmoz covers the fundamentals of an SEO campaign in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
• As social networking becomes increasingly more popular the need for reputation management grows.  According to the London School of Economics via Denise Shiffman’s Engagement blog “Every 1% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to .41% growth, while a 1% increase in positive word of mouth correlated to just .14% growth. In other words, reducing negative comments could grow revenue by 300% over increasing positive comments.”
• Search Engine Guide’s, Stoney deGeyter, takes a look back at what he wanted for Christmas from the search engines in 2002.  To see if he got what he asked for click here.
  

Bonus Articles

• Everyone working in the marketing department of your company, you may want to read this. The internet has made it much it easier to measure just how valuable you really are...sorry. 
• Want a job where you work from home making videos about whatever you want while raking in thousands of dollars a month? Well look no further than Youtube. Sounds too good to be true? Well it isn't exactly as easy as it sounds. Building up a fan base on the internet big enough for companies to want to advertise through you will take a while. But here is an article about some of the success stories of Youtube.
• Do you need to reach more people with your advertising? Well, Google has extended its AdWords products to any mobile device that has HTML browsing, such as the iPhone  or T-Mobile's G1. "This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting."
• Customer service is a big part of a computer company, and many people will purchase a certain brand over another just because of their customer service. Well, it seems that Dell did not get the memo. Dell is now "charging customers a monthly fee to have access to its United States-based customer service representatives." You can read more about it here.

chat will brb thx 4 ur p8ience 

I recently read a blog post by Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim called "R U 2 Casual w Your Biz Talk?"  In the article, Frank is reacting to a WSJ article that discusses the casual use of the abbreviated shorthand, textspeak. I understand that, for Gen Y, textspeak is a clear and concise means of communication. They live in a world where they have unlimited (or hundreds of) texts, but maybe not unlimited calling minutes with friends. A world where it may be easier and cheaper to send an IM or a text than to pick up the phone to call, not only that, people can't hear what you are texting, so it's potentially more private than a voice conversation. Truly, there are some great reasons that Generation Y prefers texting to calling.  For the professional world, textspeak is not considered to be...well...professional; and when it comes to Live Chat for our customers, it definitely does not fly.

Customers want to know that the person that they are dealing with is both competent and capable, and the use of textspeak can diminish the customer’s confidence in the abilities of the representative. The use of textspeak in a service environment is unprofessional and can reflect negatively on your company and its staff. It diminishes the customer's expectations of what your company can do for them. Perhaps a company that sells "really cool" products might find it acceptable to use loose language with sales clientele. However, when dealing with a support issue, where a customer has a potential problem, they need clear language that isn't left to their interpretation. Textspeak can also come off to a customer as smug. Do not presume that a customer is ok with textspeak if they use it during a conversation. They are counting on you to be professional, especially if there is an issue that needs resolving.

If your business uses Live Chat as a communication option, be sure to review "speaking" guidelines with your staff. Additionally, review transcripts of chats to ensure that your service reps are representing your company in a pleasing way, and that they are not communicating with your customers in a way that is confusing or juvenile. According to LivePerson in face-to-face communications "55% of what we communicate is through our tone of voice, 38% of the message is by our appearance or body language, and only 7 % is by the words we use". Clearly, live chat is does not present a face-to-face option, so the words we use become much more important. LivePerson recommends paying attention to spelling and grammar as part of your basic “netiquette”. They have provided a rather useful list of basic rules to follow:

• Use correct punctuation.
• Use proper capitalization.
• Use of exclamation marks are okay, e.g. "Sure! I'll be glad to help you."
• Maintain a friendly, but professional tone.
• Write complete sentences.
• Use articles (a, an, the) and sentences with subjects and verbs.

Talk to your reps about professional language and what that means for your company. Let your people know, when they are hired, that your office is not a place for "OMG" and "brb" and "ROFL"; especially not with customers!

Several months ago, we, the staff of Gordian Project, set out to author a blog. Not that all of us immediately found the prospect as inviting as others, but we generally engage a team spirit; thus the eCommerce and Entrepreneurship Blog.

I understood the blog’s driving purpose to be sharing our personal experiences within our given area of discipline as it relates to all things eCommerce. After several months of participation, I thought I would review our blog.

Caveat: I’d never read a blog going into this project, nor had I any desire to. The actual thought of sitting around reading peoples random thoughts makes me feel a bit voyeuristic. After reading Wikipedia’s definition of voyeuristic, it certainly isn’t that. Still, to this day, I’ve had no desire to read blogs other than for the purpose of this review.

I’m not sure it counts as “reading” but the one key area I check out on our blog each month is the Authors section of the home page. The key here is to identify how many posts I have in relation to other staff. I’m not sure what about life turns everything into a competition. This post will launch me forward to eight posts, however, I know I’ve written a couple that haven’t yet made it past the cutting room floor so this number isn’t hard and fast. But going with eight puts me in a respectable position.

Vanessa’s an over achiever at 40, but in all fairness she administrates the blog. I doubt any of her posts have hit the cutting room floor. If light reading and interesting tidbits is your thing, Vanessa’s Variety for the Week delivers. She shares what’s going on around other blog spaces, here at the office, and perhaps her life more than any other contributor.

Matt is our Development Manager. We’re among the elders of the office so I’ve truly appreciated our friendship. I don’t read his posts. I don’t understand what he does beyond the fact that I know he can fix or improve just about any internal process. Any time I walk past his desk he has a monitor filled with gibberish. I simply figure I won’t understand his posts either. Nice picture of his son in his most recent post though.

You might also notice Zach has 11 posts as of today. I’d read his if you only have a few minutes each day. Scanning through his titles, (that counts as reading I don’t care what anyone says) I find his posts most on topic: They include Website Improvements: Test Basic Usability Before Advancing, Google Sitelinks: Capturing My Proverbial Moby Dick, and Google Search Engine Results Pages Illustrated.

As a partner of Gordian Project I have to say bang up job Brian! I particularly enjoyed your Soft Economy Priorities? Time to Paint Your Parking Spaces; that’s leadership.

I’d like to thank Josh for his most recent post, The iPhone 3G Saved My Life. It truly inspired me to write this post. All this time I’d banged my head against the desk trying to come up with another post showcasing the thrilling world of Supply Chain, when all I needed was an iPhone post. Below, the desk I bang my head on as taken with my iPhone.

Over time, you’ll notice that Elizabeth stopped contributing as often. I have mixed emotions on this one. Elizabeth so desired to be a mother and now she is enjoying that gift with her daughter, Kara, as a stay at home mom. Congratulations Liz! However, Elizabeth also worked in Supply Chain and guess what that means, I’ve had to cover Supply Chain blogging without her. Thanks Liz!

I’ve actually loved reading Ellen’s posts for the first time as I prepared for this post. Ellen has taken the reins of a department that everyone loves to hate, HR. She sifts through all the big issues like food programs and political sensitivity. What a fun department to be in. Blog post ideas just shoot across Ellen’s desk, I’m sure. Ellen also manages Accounts Payable but I’ve yet to see a post with any real hard numbers.

Ryan takes his job seriously. He’s building a career, a future. He’s a smart guy who understands this isn’t just a 9 to 5 but an opportunity for him to build a foundation for his future. He’s always learning and looking for how to add value to the company. His posts are read as a “Where’s Ryan?” I just hope he’s not building his resume based on Ryan’s Randomness for the Week of June 20th, 2008.

Tim, as partner, bang up job! Please don’t break your run on providing an image in every post. No one does it better than you.

Our blog was launched just prior to Simon’s moving on to launch his own business. Nice work getting in a post you can use as a business card.

Before you jump to any conclusions about why Emily posted her first and, to this day, last post May 19th 2008, I dare you to read it (Dealing with Difficult Customers: Best Practices for Addressing Customer Complaints). She is right now over there fighting the good fight. Without her and her team keeping those customers happy there’s no need for this eCommerce and Entrepreneurship blog.

And finally I’d like to say welcome to Arianna. She brings so much to the table: customer service experience, multilingual, eye for detail and now she’s a vital part of Supply Chain. FYI Arianna…I’m going to need at least one post a month.

So those are my “collective of experiences, thoughts, processes and updates from people that are not only actively working in ecommerce but are also zealous about the industry.”