IBM SALES CENTER FOR WEBSPHERE COMMERCE
Rich Operational and Analytic Functionality Lets You Deliver Effective Assisted-Service for Ecommerce
By Mitchell I. Kramer, February 21, 2008

NETTING IT OUT

Sometimes customers need your help to perform ecommerce activities. They’d like to escalate from self-service to assisted-service in order to complete their work. We call that help assisted-service for ecommerce.

IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce is IBM’s assisted-service for ecommerce offering. Sales Center was introduced with IBM WebSphere Commerce V6.0 in May 2006 and is available as a separately orderable add-on. To date, IBM claims that approximately two dozen customers have purchased Sales Center.

On the PSGroup Report Card for Assisted-Service for Ecommerce, IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce exceeds requirements for operational functionality, analytic functionality, and company viability. It needs improvement in channel support.

We recommend IBM Sales Center to every organization that has implemented WebSphere Commerce as the mechanism for delivering assisted-service for ecommerce and a cross-channel customer experience for ecommerce. For those organizations in the process of selecting an ecommerce platform, IBM Sales Center makes IBM WebSphere Commerce a much more attractive choice.

ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE

Helping Your Customers Explore, Select, and Purchase Your Products and Services

In our customer service research and consulting practice, we talk about cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. By cross-lifecycle, we mean that customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, from their initial contact with you through their retirement. By cross-channel, we’ve meant that customers want your help on every channel through which they interact with you—the Web and email for self-service, your contact center, stores, and your field service force for assisted-service.

Ecommerce systems use the Web self-service channel to let customers perform activities within the "explore, select, purchase, and maintain" lifecycle phases. They’re your self-service Web marketing and sales application. Most commonly, ecommerce systems let customers learn about your products, compare them, configure them, price them, buy them, and even return them. Ecommerce systems also have account management capabilities. Your customers create ecommerce accounts in order to register their payment methods, shipping methods, and name and address in order to pay for and receive your products.

In Table A, we list these activities within each lifecycle phase in a little more detail.

Customer Ecommerce Activities
(Please download the formatted PDF to view the table at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr02-21-08cc.)
Table A. Typical ecommerce activities that customers perform are listed in this table within their lifecycle phase.

Customers Need Assisted-Service for Ecommerce

Sometimes, customers need assisted-service to perform these activities. For example, your ecommerce system may be missing important services or content around the products in which they’re interested such as the detailed description and configurator for a brand-new bundle. Or you don’t provide content about replacements and compatibility for products that you’re about to discontinue. Or you don’t let them change their username online.

At other times, customers need assisted-service because they have difficulty using your ecommerce facilities to perform these activities. For example, they can’t find they product they want to buy by using their terminology in your ecommerce search service. Or your product descriptions don’t include the information critical to their selection approach like laundering instructions. Or they’re confused by the wording of your “two for” promotion. Or your account registration form has a field that they don’t understand.

At still other times, customers need assisted-service because they can’t or won’t use the Web to do business with you. Telephone assisted-service with your agents is their preferred or only available channel.

Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications

The best approach to assisted-service for ecommerce is multi-channel ecommerce applications that support Web self-service and Web chat and contact center assisted-service. Multi-channel ecommerce applications should provide role-based access to the data and services that agents need in order to perform the activities for which customers need assisted-service. For example, the customer service agent role should provide the service that lets agents view and update the product, quantity, price, payment, or shipping of any item of any customer’s order. It should also provide a service that lets agents view and offer any of the promotions that you’ve created for a particular product. In addition, multi-channel ecommerce provides role-based access to additional assisted-service capabilities such as changing prices, authorizing returns, and making accommodations.

Extending ecommerce to multiple channels can have bottom-line impact, reducing costs and increasing revenue and making assisted-service for ecommerce a critical component of your customer experience.

Multi-Channel Ecommerce Applications Have Recently Become Available

Recently, ecommerce suppliers have recognized requirements for multi-channel ecommerce. They’ve expanded the channel support and the customer service functionality of their offerings to implement the assisted-service for ecommerce that we’ve just described. They offer assisted-service “in the box” as an add-on feature or via integration with an external assisted-service product.

• If your ecommerce supplier offers assisted-service capabilities, then you should seriously consider their implementation in your ecommerce system.

• If you are evaluating new or replacement ecommerce applications, then support for multi-channel ecommerce should be a critical evaluation and selection factor.

We’ve extended our framework for evaluating ecommerce products to help you make your selection and implementation decisions. The framework is presented and discussed in the next section of this report.

EVALUATING ASSISTED-SERVICE FOR ECOMMERCE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

We’ve adapted and combined our frameworks for ecommerce and for cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service to create a framework for assisted-service for ecommerce. The top-level criteria of this evaluation framework are listed and described below. The top-level criteria and sub-criteria are shown graphically in Illustration 1.

• ROLES AND OPERATIONAL FUNCTIONALITY. Operational functionality makes up the ecommerce activities that your customer service agents can perform on behalf of your customers. In our evaluation of operational functionality for assisted-service for ecommerce systems, we assess the lifecycle activities a product supports and the customer roles that can perform those activities.

• CHANNEL SUPPORT. Assisted-service can be delivered across a range of channels. While telephone communication via the contact center is the obvious assisted-service channel, other channels like Web chat are also important. For channel support, we examine which channels a product supports.

• ANALYTIC FUNCTIONALITY. You need to be able to measure, analyze, and refine the assisted-service that your agents deliver. Within analytic functionality, we examine and evaluate the collection and presentation of agent behavior and performance information.

• ARCHITECTURE. In architecture, we examine the implementation of an assisted-service for ecommerce product in order to evaluate its integrated with your existing ecommerce and customer service systems.

• PRODUCT VIABILITY. This evaluation criterion allows us to assess the business and risk in implementing an assisted-service for ecommerce product.

• COMPANY VIABILITY. Where product viability examines product-oriented risk factors, company viability examines risk factors with the product’s supplier.

We will use this framework to evaluate IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce.

IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce is IBM’s assisted-service for ecommerce offering. “Sales Center” is a separately orderable add-on feature of WebSphere Commerce Professional and Enterprise Editions. It was introduced with WebSphere Commerce V6.0 in July 2006. Its next version will be introduced with WebSphere Commerce 7.0 sometime in 2009.

To date, IBM claims that about two dozen organizations have purchased Sales Center. Most are currently in the deployment process. The organizations are in a range of industry segments and cover a wide range of organization sizes.

Sales Center deploys on an Eclipse-based, rich client platform and uses a messaging approach to access the same WebSphere Commerce data that customers have access to. While agents can also perform the same ecommerce activities that customers perform, the distinguishing feature of Sales Center is the wide range of assisted-service activities that agents can access and perform through its messaging interface. Activities around quote, orders, returns, and customer accounts are very rich. They’re key differentiators and the strength of the offering.