Smoke and Mirrors

January 2003

The rise and fall of Internet based companies inside the 'Dotcom Bubble' may have left many suspicious and sceptical of the use of technology as a direct interface to customers. But some of the unsustainable aspects of this supposed revolution could be seen as beneficial and actually promoted good business forward thinking. A realignment of strategies appeared to take place within the 'bricks and clicks', or traditional, companies who, however briefly, took up the gauntlet of the challenge offered by these newcomers to the market. Almost overnight, Internet presence and electronic channels became essential offerings in the corporate repertoire.

But, could traditional companies take their current processes and fuse and evolve this with new channels of communication to become more efficient and proactive with their customers? The failure of the Dotcoms was based around their inability to do exactly the opposite, to turn efficient customer communications and link them to the tangible world. The failure of the approach from one direction should have given impetus to the counter-approach to gain the same objective but with the benefit of existing substance and hindsight.

Tragically, traditional businesses have seen the failure of Internet businesses as an indication of flawed methodology rather than execution. Far too many organisations pay only lip service to electronic media and treat it as a second class citizen to more 'traditional' methods of communication. The vast majority have not integrated new ways of transacting with customers into the systems, methods and procedures that actually define the way they conduct business, they simply apply the 'smoke and mirrors' approach to presenting an image of advancement.

I once tried to buy something on-line from a company that had originally come to my attention through a catalogue I received through the post. When I found that entering some of the catalogue numbers came back with an 'item not found' message I reverted to the telephone, only to be told that "the catalogue and the on-line divisions were actually separate and had different stock numbers" - not exactly a joined up business. This may seem ridiculous but is more and more commonplace if you peek just a little below the surface. It is very easy and inexpensive to place a veneer at your shop window but a little more involved to carry this through to the conclusion of a transaction. So it is not being done and an opportunity is being missed, while at the same time generating a self perpetuating prophesy about the instability of the Internet as a channel for business. To illustrate this, let's examine the methods and business psychology that surround the simple support of e-mail.

E-mail is probably the oldest form of bi-directional communication that resulted as a direct benefit of the Internet. It is very much an 'off-line' medium that has characteristics in common with written communication such as letters. When compared against a letter you have the same ability to construct, in your own time, a structured and measured communication of your intent, but have the ability to send it at great speed, low cost and with high reliability to the target organisation. The only more direct form of communication is by telephone or personal visit but this has the disadvantage on both sides of the customer-supplier relationship that physical presence is required. This is not practical if you want to capture one of the benefits of the Internet which is the globalisation of the marketplace. With there being clear benefits on both sides there has long been a case for integrating this into businesses and actively encouraging use as a primary form of legible and auditable communication, but strangely there has been a resistance to do this, or even to extend the same conventions and courtesies to this as to it's close cousin, the letter.

E-mail packages have a couple of options to add requests for receipts into the header of the mail being sent. Generally either a 'delivery receipt' that lets you know that the e-mail has been delivered to the mail server of the recipient or a 'read receipt' that indicates that the e-mail has been opened and, theoretically, read by someone. If you ask for a receipt on an e-mail, you are mirroring almost exactly the process by which you send registered mail. If registered mail arrived at your business, not only would it be perceived as important, but you would not dream of refusing to sign the receipt. Yet most corporate e-mail systems are configured not to send receipts and e-mail is generally regarded as the lowest priority channel for reply.

In my own unscientific research amongst worldwide finance, technology and IT companies, e-mails sent to 'sales' or 'info' e-mail addresses, published by the companies themselves, on average took 7 days to get a reply and 20% were never replied to at all. Messages sent with delivery and read receipt requests returned this information in less than 50% of cases. If these kind of statistics came from any company relative to telephone calls or even letters, one would question the viability of the organisation. Yet for e-mail, a commonly available form of communication, this will probably not be a surprise.

So what's the issue with e-mail? Generally the 'problem' that is cited with sending receipts is that of service levels and customer expectations. It is seen that, once a receipt is seen then the customer expects the relevant action to follow - the target organisation has no 'greyness' of delivery behind which to hide. Consider that statement carefully, what is really being said is that organisations are clinging to opportunities to avoid transparency of processing to customers, which is a very dangerous impression to give. Any advertised communications channel has an 'open for business' sign logically attached to it - any failure or apparent delay in response puts up the 'closed' sign.

An item as simple as a managed receipt is not only correct point of etiquette but is also an opportunity to meet a criticism that is levelled at e-mails in that they are detached and impersonal. From a marketing perspective alone, consider that fact that the request for an electronic receipt is a solicited request for a response from a customer where their initial expectation is nothing more than a date and time but, in a completely automated and efficient manner could give confidence of your company being 'open and active' and also allow you to deliver a marketing or corporate positioning statement at the same time.

This is just a tiny element of the overall picture of e-commerce, but I believe that this piece of protocol and lack of understanding of customer dynamics is a classic illustration of just how far we are away from understanding how systems join up to create efficiencies. If you look at many 'interactive' web sites you will just find slick front-end processes being squeezed back through inefficient and inappropriate processes that were built for another era. Much more attention needs to be paid to treating all channels with the same standards of service and realising the advantages offered by things that you already have, if you interface them in an intelligent and consistent manner.