Customer relationship management in e-commerce: the call center solution

E-commerce is not just the transaction, it is also the customer service. The advent of interactive e-commerce has without doubt made buying and selling on the Web successful. However, it continues to lack the quality of personal contact with the customer, which is essential in building and sustaining customer relationships on the Internet. "Real-time" text communication currently used by some companies lacks the voice and video combination that is needed to fill this communication gap. According to Forrester Research, only 16% of web users actually read the web page word by word. 67% of on-line consumers follow it to the order page but do not complete a transaction. In response to this problem, this research entails developing a software interface that will enable a Web customer to click and talk to a sales representative in real-time and also see the picture and the profile of the sales representative. In this research, a web user initiates a WebClick (live representative) request, that passes through the Internet and the Web server notifies our server of an incoming call. The server in turn notifies the sales representative's computer by generating a "Web pop" showing the particular page the customer was browsing at the time the call was initiated. The sales representative can now speak with the web user or route the call to another sales representative. This research was limited to voice only.