Do you prefer canned or fresh vegetables?  If you're like most people, you're likely less fond of canned vegetables.  And, chances are, you are even less of a fan of canned responses when it comes to customer service.

Mila D'Antonio at 1to1 shares an amusing anecdote about a "creepy" in-store experience where canned responses had her questioning the sincerity of her customer service reps, and the logic behind the retailer's decision making.

There's a lesson to be learned here when it comes to online chat aswell.  While canned responses can be a tremendous way to improve agent efficiency (and lower time to resolution) by providing agents with predetermined responses to common questions, they must be used wisely!  If the context of when and where you use them is wrong, you risk "creeping" out your customers or, even worse, losing them.

In many cases, relying too heavily on canned responses could defeat the purpose of offering customers live assistance to begin with. 

But there's still some work to be done.  MediaPost today reports on a new ranking released this week by the Customer Respect Group that evaluates online store performance.  According to Terry Golesworthy, president of Customer Respect Group, "The biggest change in the last year, is that more and more Web sites are using real-time customer service tools such as pop-up windows and click-to-call features, 'which lets sites help customers with what they're doing right now." Previously, many of the large Web sites offered consumers only a chance to e-mail questions--"a process that usually takes 24 hours and often results in an abandoned shopping cart.'"

Overall, the report found that retailers are leading other industries in general when it comes to customer communication.  According to their findings:

The retail industry was rated best in the area of communicating with online visitors in 2007, scoring 7.0 in Responsiveness, compared to 6.5 scored by the next highest-rated industries -- financial services and telecommunications. The variety of contact methods available to retail customers was one positive factor.

Twenty-two percent of retail sites now provide online chat, compared to the all-industry average of just 12%. Also noted was the emergence of pro-active “chat,” where visitors are invited to engage in a context-sensitive dialog based on their online behavior. “click to call” prompting a telephone call directly from the retailer to the user also showed a strong upward trend as retailers look to limit site abandonment.

Other communication channels remain well supported. Sixty-five percent of e-mail inquiries to retail companies were responded to within a day, compared to 57% among all other industries studied during the year.. Eighty-three percent of inquiries received a helpful reply -- again well ahead of the average of 60%.

However, the report points out that despite some advances, there is still a glaring gap between the way consumers experience a brand online and in-store, and consumers continue to be distrustful of the differences they see in price, benefits and services. In addition to those cross-channel disparities, consumers are still cautious about sites that don't reassure their privacy concerns.

An oft-overlooked aspect of Click to Call and Call Tracking services is Reverse Lookup. Reverse Lookup delivers enhanced and actionable data for every call placed through Click to Call, or to a Call Tracking telephone number. 

Unlike standard caller ID information, Reverse Lookup offers more granularity and accuracy.  

What can Reverse Lookup do for you?

• Generate a list of self-selected prospects who have contacted your agents within the past month, quarter,or year.

• Follow up on lost leads.

• Supplement your corporate marketing database with interested prospects.

• Maximize the value of every call that has already come in, or capture enhanced data as calls continue to come in.

It seems rather obvious, but a new study confirms that tracking customer buying behavior across channels can have a tremendous impact on helping companies understand and market to consumers.  A new report by Deloitte Consulting “Look Closer, Look Further: How to Build a Better Business Case for Improving Information Capabilities” finds that the more information companies have about consumer buying patterns, the better companies can make special offers.

This means that companies should be looking at customer data across channels and integrating that data to get a true sense of customer buying patterns.  However, as the author of the report, Jane Griffin, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, points out, "Now if a customer goes into a store, the retailer doesn’t necessarily have information on orders the customer may have placed online and can’t make a personalized offer based on her online activity.”  

While the influence of online research on offline sales is certain, the consumers that begin research online still need to provide context when they walk into a store.  There are companies making inroads in driving traffic from the Web to stores, and while their offerings, along with technologies like Save & Send, make it easy to quantify leads, there's still much work that needs to be done to qualify them and leverage that data across channels. Right now, when a customer walks into a store, there's no way of knowing what they're looking for or if they're a loyal customer.

Unfortunately, the same is true in many cases when consumers transition from the Web to the contact center.  Loyal customers that have already invested time conducting research online must often start over again when they move across channels to place an order over the phone.  Not only is this frustrating for the consumer, but this lack of insight inhibits the ability of businesses to offer relevant cross-sells and up-sells.  Fortunately, solutions like Click to Call and Chat, are helping to bridge this gap. However, as powerful as these communication tools can be just by nature of delivering immediate human contact, they would be less effective without real-time access to the data they produce so that companies could determine (on the fly) what offers work best.

November's edition of Internet Retailer features a story on what's ahead in the world of e-commerce.  One change the article predicts is how companies redefine the success of e-commerce by tying it to the contact center through services like click to call and click to chat.