New Technologies Improve Customer Self-Service

Customer self-service efforts online have been picking up as new technologies let companies make more information readily available to customers. NativeMinds Inc. this week introduced a packaged application designed to let consumer packaged-goods companies quickly create virtual customer representatives who can answer hundreds of questions commonly asked by consumers. Meanwhile, Lamps Plus Inc. revealed that it's been getting powerful results from the use of EasyAsk's navigational search technology to improve the effectiveness of its online store.

NativeMind's application, which already has been deployed by companies such Coca-Cola, Iams, Miller Brewing, PepsiCo, and Unilever, lets companies devise customized answers to several hundred preloaded questions, taking a reverse approach to the use of taxonomy. Instead of searching for information from within a company's data, it actually uses a question taxonomy to map similar questions back to a core answer, thus making it possible to provide answers to thousands of questions with only those hundreds of answers. There's also room for companies to add answers to a couple of hundred additional questions that are unique to their businesses.

The thinking, says Aaron Rosenbaum, VP of marketing and products at NativeMinds, is that consumers generally come to brand-name sites with very general questions, but they ask them in different ways. By being able to intelligently apply a single answer to multiple variations on a question, the NativeMinds app takes some of the heavy taxonomy work out of producing an interactive online agent. The application, which starts at $100,000, represents the second major vertical market for which NativeMinds has built a custom app; the first was an automotive virtual rep now used by Ford and Nissan.

Lamps Plus chose instead to refine the search capabilities of its site, using EasyAsk's self-service search and navigation engine not only to improve its Web site, but also to leverage its investment in in-store Web kiosks, six of which were installed last year in all of the retailer's 44 stores, most of which are in the western United States. The EasyAsk technology essentially turns navigation into de facto search by automatically triggering the search engine each time a customer clicks on a link. The site's previous search functionality required customers to select all the attributes of a lighting fixture--for instance, the customer would use drop-down menus to select a particular size of fixture, with a certain finish, costing between $50 and $99, and in a specific style. Customers frequently figured out they'd chosen something they didn't want, and they had to backtrack, says owner and president Dennis Swanson.

The EasyAsk engine assumes shoppers don't know what they're looking for, instead asking them to select a finish, for example, and then showing all the items in that finish. Then they can select the price they want, and the engine drills down further to bring back a more refined assortment of products, and so on. It may sound like a minor distinction, but it's hard to argue with the results. Since Lamps Plus went live with EasyAsk in January, online sales are up at least 10%, Swanson says, and the percentage of those sales that require the involvement of a live sales rep has dropped from 60% to less than 45%. What's more, the new search technology has resulted in the in-store kiosks generating rising sales of special-order items that aren't stocked in the stores, sales that might never have occurred otherwise.

All of this is astounding to Swanson, who says that just two years ago, he was operating under the assumption that the Web would never be a viable channel for selling lighting fixtures. He had resigned the Lamps Plus site to being a vehicle for driving customers to his stores, but all that's changed, and the Web site has become a powerful sales channel, aided greatly by the improving self-service capabilities. "If you'd told me this was possible two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it," Swanson says. "It's revolutionizing our business."