Customers.com Technologies

Updated Evaluation Framework for Customer Service Products

We’ve updated our evaluation framework for customer service products. Market trends and product specialization were our motivations. Ease of use and speed were your requirements. You can use the new framework to evaluate any customer service offering.

The two market trends that prompted us to do this update at this time are the rise of social media and the increased usage of mobile devices like iPhones.

Customers, especially consumers, look to social media to get help from other customers for ratings, reviews, and references when they want to buy products and services and for support when they’re having trouble installing and using them. Suppliers and merchants, very much aware of these social conversations, have been building their own presences on social media (think Facebook Fan pages) so that their customers might look to them for social help. Suppliers and merchants are also monitoring social conversations to get ahead of customer requirements and customer issues.

Consumers and business customers alike are using their mobile devices as portable computers, wanting to use their full capabilities, not just to get SMS status updates. iPhones, Blackberries, and the like have the computing power, and their networks have the speed and the bandwidth to drive full-function browsers. Full function browsers are the platform for customer self-service and even Web chat-based assisted-service. 

Recommendations: Avail Behavioral Merchandising

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Our analysis of Avail Behavioral Merchandising is our third review of a recommendation solution using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The target market for Avail Behavioral Merchandising, as for RichRelevance Recommendations and Omniture Recommendations, is ecommerce, especially retail ecommerce. As is often the case, retailers are in the lead in adopting a technology that has so much impact on the customer experience—and on their bottom lines. Recommendations not only deliver the most interesting content in general, they can deliver the most interesting content specific to this visitor in this context. And for a merchant, delivering the most interesting content means enticing customers to buy more now, rather than get frustrated or bored and leave. Avail’s clients typically see revenue increases ranging from 5 to 30 percent per visitor. Not surprisingly, Avail has had very strong growth in the ecommerce market.

Avail Behavioral Merchandising is among the more mature recommendation offerings, on the market since 2001. This maturity is apparent in its UI, which has advanced features such as preview and test capabilities. Avail Behavioral Merchandising also has some unique capabilities that open new possibilities for merchants to work together, including collaborative merchandising and syndicated merchandising. Avail Intelligence is based in Sweden and has mostly European clients, a demonstration of its multinational and multicurrency capabilities.

IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0, Strengthening a Strong Offering

IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 is the new and current release of the ecommerce software platform offering of IBM Corporation. This is a major new version that was introduced on October 30, 2009. It includes a wealth of new and enhanced capabilities. The scope and scale of improvements is so broad and so deep that we’ve focused this report on what’s new and improved in the offering. The best new capabilities are:

• The B2C starter store starter store is a comprehensive implementation of WebSphere Commerce functionality delivered through a Web 2.0 UI. Merchants can reuse the ecommerce resources of B2C starter store within their sites or can base their ecommerce implementations on them and customize their features to support their ecommerce processes and their brands and styles.

• WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0 has an implementation of the B2C starter store for mobile devices. It offers a completely reusable appropriate subset of the capabilities of the Web starter store.

• Dialog activities is an event-driven marketing and merchandising facility that supports the delivery of SMS and email messages in response to customer activities.

• Social commerce facilities support social media, social profiles, ratings and reviews, and photo galleries via widget-based access to social service providers. They support marketing, merchandising, and community building.

• Integration, a key strength in previous versions, is even better in Version 7.0. Improvements include additional Web Services (exposing all WebSphere Commerce functionality), continuing SOA transformation, improved integration with WebSphere MQ and WebSphere portal, and improved facilities for integration with distributed order management systems.

• Analytic functionality is provided by Coremetrics. Instrumentation is automatic and comprehensive. Many predefined reports are packaged.

Investing in Personal Recommendations

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Recommendations are hot—just ask the vendors of recommendation solutions. Recommendations are hot—according to the potential buyers we surveyed early this year. All of our respondents are interested in deploying recommendations at some point, and almost half plan to deploy in the next 18 months.

What are recommendations for? That's a simpler, and possibly harder question. Our respondents have clearly heard the message that recommendations help revenue and improve the customer experience. Interestingly, most North American respondents also see recommendations as a tool for personalization—for the user experiences of both customers and employees. Europeans, famously less exuberant [though not, as we see from the financial news, more rational] think the jury is still out on personalization.

Exuberant Americans will take their recommendation technology any way it's served: home grown, commercial on-premise software, or SaaS. Europeans, who shipped most of their cowboys westward over the past three centuries, do not want any home grown software, thank you very much; leave that "do it my way" impulse to the cowboys. Our European respondents really just want recommendations technology the way technology is supposed to be delivered, via commercial on-premise software. That SaaS thing, hmm, not so sure about that. This reluctance is a shame—what could be better than having a vendor striving to win your love and esteem daily? Even after you sign the contract? The beauty of SaaS, with the loving client care, ease of implementation, and low up-front cost will win the skeptics over eventually.