Smart Interactive Characters
Automating One-To-One Customer Care
By Barbara Hayes-Roth
Despite its great potential for commerce, entertainment, and learning, today's Web suffers one critical limitation -- it's a strictly self-service environment. Whether customers are seeking goods, services, or information, they navigate Web sites alone. This mechanical interaction with unknowing, unfeeling machines can frustrate people and discourage transactions. Compounding the problem, self-service environments often fail to deliver the positive benefits of active, skillful, personal-touch customer care.
Today's Web visitors are customers, in the broadest sense of the word, who have come to the Web to find information, purchase goods, or participate in community activities. Companies such as GM, Mercedes-Benz, Tower Records, and Egghead Software are trying to reinstate the positive outcome of traditional customer care by supplementing their Web sites with call-center personnel who can immediately assist users over telephone or Internet chat connections. Although this approach has obvious value to customers, it's expensive, it's labor intensive, and it doesn't scale well. Already, companies that provide support software for call-center staffing of Web sites are offering "triage" capabilities for ensuring service to their "most important" customers. Other companies are addressing customer support using various forms of mass customization, for example, using expert advisors, collaborative filtering recommendation systems, question-answering agents, profile-based information push, and centralized customer support.
