By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
January 31st, 2001

See Also   The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet   Alternative Payment Solutions   Fraud Prevention Tools   Top Tools to Help You Boost Customer Service   iV-Caller Verification Service   Make Your Price Sell!   FindWhat.com   Make Your Knowledge Sell!   HumanClick   Netship   iFulfill.com   Nexchange   Nothing But 'Net   Netwhistle.com   Bigstep.com   Make Your Site Sell!   AWeber   GoTo.com   Constant Contact   WebAdverts   PersonalStore   SiteInspector   LinkExchange   ClickTrade   Safe   eCHARGE   MilliCent

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

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

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

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 24x7 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

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

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, LivePerson, talk 'n' view and VoIPower.

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 links to some of the main players in this field:

ordertaking.net
CyberRep.com
CallTech
ECHO Communications