By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
January 31st, 2001
As promised, for this last article in the Online Customer Service series I’m going to take a look at some tools and services that can help you improve the customer experience and service of visitors in your Web store.
I’ve divided these products and services in to four categories:
- Products that will help you ensure that your site is free of errors.
- Products that will monitor your Web store and alert you if it goes offline or develops a fault.
- Products that will enable you to interact with visitors while they are browsing in your store.
- Companies to which you can outsource all or part of your customer service activities.
Keeping Your Site Free of Errors
In a previous article in this series, I explained why it was usually the simple mistakes that irritated customers the most. And basic site problems – slow download speeds, broken links, spelling mistakes, faulty HTML coding etc.- clearly fall in to this category of simple problems that can usually be fixed quickly and cheaply.
There are many tools and services available on line that will help you check a particular aspect of your site (for example HTML validation) but here I’m going to focus on a couple of products that provide a suite of tools to help you quickly check many key aspects of your site.
Web Site Garage provides two services of interest here, Tune Up and Gif Lube.
Tune Up runs five critical diagnostic checks on your Web pages:
- Browser Compatibility – verifies that your Web store will display correctly in different browsers and versions.
- Load Time Check – calculates theoretical load time based on speeds from 14.4K to T1.
- Dead Link Check – detects dead links.
- Spell Check – catches misspelled words (US English only).
- HTML Check – verifies your HTML coding against the 3.2 standard.
Gif Lube automatically reduces the size of images on your page, which will speed up the page loading time.
Pricing: Unknown! Web Site Garage has traditionally offered a free, one page service and then charged for subsequent pages. However, Web Site Garage is in the process of being absorbed in to Netscape’s Netcenter and although the free, one page service is still available, all mention of pricing for larger numbers of pages has disappeared from their Web site. I’m sure that Netscape will fix this within the next few weeks though – may be they intend making the service totally free?
NetMechanic offers a similar suite of tools as Web Site Garage with its HTML Toolbox and GIFBot services. One important difference is that as well as detecting HTML errors, HTML Toolbox is able to fix most errors it finds and can generate a repaired file for you to upload to your server.
Pricing: GIFBot is free. The HTML Toolbox is priced as follows:
| 5 or less pages | Free |
| 6 – 100 pages | $35 per URL |
| 101 – 400 pages | $200 per URL |
Pricing for higher quantities of pages is available on request from NetMechanic.
Making Sure Your Store is Always Available
Ask any e-tailer to list the advantages of selling on the Web and usually the first answer you’ll get is that it enables them to be open for business 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. However, while a Web store should provide this capability in theory, how can you be sure that your store truly is always available?
The answer is to use one of the many site-monitoring services that are now available, for example NetMechanic’s Server Check Pro or Netwhistle.com’s PersonalWhistle or BusinessWhistle.
Server Check Pro automatically monitors your server every 15 minutes and notifies you by numeric pager, alphanumeric pager, or email, if it discovers a problem.
You can define problem conditions for which you want to be notified. Options include:
- Server is not responding.
- Server is slow to respond.
- Missing keywords on your page.
- Server performance below a desired level.
Pricing: $9.99 set up then $9.99 per URL per month. Problem notifications are free except those to long distance pagers, which cost $0.35 per call.
One limitation of the Server Check Pro service is that it is unable to check SSL secured pages (i.e. those beginning with https://) and in a Web store these are likely to be the most important of all – after all, there’s little point in checking that your catalog is working OK when your vital checkout pages might be down! However the next product, Netwhistle, does overcome this problem.
Netwhistle comes in two flavors, the free PersonalWhistle service and the premium BusinessWhistle.
PersonalWhistle is limited to a maximum of 5 targets per customers with available targets being HTTP, PING, SMTP, or POP3 servers (HTTPS servers can only be tested under BusinessWhistle). PersonalWhistle provides 24×7 monitoring with your server being tested every 1 or 6 hours. Notification of any problem is by email or pager.
BusinessWhistle builds on the PersonalWhistle service by providing a more extensive list of targets that can be monitored (including HTTPS and FTP servers) as well as increasing the frequency at which servers can be monitored – as often as every 5 minutes if you want!
Pricing for BusinessWhistle is dependant on what monitoring interval you select:
- 30 minute interval: $28.95
- 15 minute interval: $33.95
- 5 minute interval: $48.95
Prices are per target, per month.
Similar monitoring services are available from Red Alert whilst Keynote provide the most extensive (and expensive!) monitoring services of all.
Interacting With Your Customers
What’s the first thing you do when you’re in a brick-and-mortar store and can’t find what you’re looking for? You ask an assistant for help. Until relatively recently, e-tailers were unable to interact with their customers in this way, but there are now a whole host of products available that can help.
HumanClick enables visitors to ask e-tailers for assistance by clicking on an icon that initiates a text-only chat session with a customer service representative.
HumanClick now comes in three flavors: Free, Express and Pro. The key differences between the three versions are:
- Free version carries third-party banner adverts and does not allow the chat window to be customized.
- Free and Express versions do not allow pages to be “pushed” to a customer i.e. you can not send your visitorsdirectly to the pages they’re looking for or send them HTML commands in the chat window.
- Free and Express versions are limited to three concurrent chat sessions.
Pricing: HumanClick Express $19.50 per month, HumanClick Pro $89.50 per month.
Livehelper provides basically the same text-chat features as HumanClick but adds an important extra – the ability to have real-time voice conversations with visitors too! The number of concurrent chats you can run is unlimited, and your visitors only need a standard Internet browser for text chat or a small 80k plugin for full duplex voice conversations.
The service is completely free and it does not carry any adverts.
Similar customer interaction tools are available from groopz and LivePerson.
Outsourcing Customer Service
I’ve little room here to go into this huge topic in any depth. However, there are now many companies offering to take on your customer service activities for you. But be warned: most of these services are targeted at large companies and the have a price structure that reflects this!
Here are is a link to one of the main players in this field:
Related Posts:
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So when your customers go online to search for businesses like yours, you need to have a web site that converts them from prospects to profitable customers. You also need to have a presence in the places where your customers are searching on the Net. That includes the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. It also should include Internet YellowPages, regional resources like the web sites of local newspapers and national local directories like Local. com