After nearly a week, people are still chiming in about Wal-Mart's decision to go all-in on self-service for their online customer service needs.  According to John Ragsdale of the Service & Support Professionals Association, "To eliminate service options for before-sales service doesn’t sit right with me. With the holiday shopping season right around the corner, I hope other retailers don’t follow Walmart.com’s lead.  It could make for an even more frustrating shopping season than usual, and that, my friends, is a terrifying thought."

Meanwhile, Evan Schuman writes at eWeek.com, "I'm not sure what's more disconcerting. Is it that Wal-Mart believes its customers will never need Web site help or that it thinks that its Web systems are now so flawless that customer service backup is not necessary?"

For those of you that missed it, this blog has a detailed run down of the keynote presentations given at this year's Shop.org Annual Summit, including Kelly Mooney's speech on The Open Brand where she examined the evolution of how online consumers interact with brands.

Next week in Denver, search marketers will gather for the SMX Local & Mobile conference.  One of the major challenges with local and mobile search marketing lies with tracking: Although people search for information online, most purchases are still made at brick-and-mortar stores. This session focuses on techniques for measuring the effectiveness of your local and mobile search marketing campaigns regardless of where the ultimate conversions occur.

On October 1, one of the conference's panels will cover the issue of tracking clicks and calls to conversion.  eStara's Cid Jenkins will join a panel of experts, including executives from AOL, Keyrelevance and DoubleClick to discuss best practices and trends in this space.

We hope to see you there. 

DM News today is running a profile of Superpages.com's pay for calls program that looks at how the company leverages call tracking to support its advertisers.   According to Robyn Rose, vice president of marketing for Superpages.com, “Local search is about connecting consumers with businesses in the most relevant geography for the consumer.  Local search is frequently about an offline transaction made with a service-based business or at a retail store. Consumers are getting smarter, and while research is done online for products and services, the majority of transactions still occur offline.”

Pay per call is one way to reach local consumers and provide better exposure to local small and midsize businesses and local locations of regional and national businesses,

In a surprising move, retailer Wal-mart has decided to remove all human contact from its website.   According to the New York Times, "As part of what Wal-Mart is calling its “Customer Contact Reduction” program, by next week, Walmart.com, the company’s online arm, will no longer give customers a toll-free phone number to call–or any phone number, for that matter–if they have a question."

A Wal-Mart official stated that this move was the result of a significant number of calls being related to order tracking, and that improvements to the Web site will make the tracking easier without human assistance.

The decision has customer service experts baffled.  

According to one expert, “Wal-Mart is trying to save money in a vacuum...It costs money to handle customer contact. The question is, ‘what value is there in that longer term, in the ability to keep a strong focus on what your customers are saying?’”

Not too long ago, the Times reported on another company, Netflix, that took the opposite path and opted for the voice channel as their preferred customer service tool. Their rationale was that a world-class e-mail program was still going to be consistently lower in quality and effectiveness than a phone program.

While it remains to be seen how this will work out for Wal-mart, it's possible they could be throwing the baby out with the bath water.  There are instances where the contact center can be a sales center, but it depends on how you engage your customers to begin with.  It seems as if the problem here was helping customers find the right channel for their needs.  The company saw the phone as a cost, but that could be because of when and where they were offering it as an option.  If you offer your phone number on pages where customers can track their shipments, customers will use the phone to track their shipments.

What happens now if a customer has a sales related question that can't be handled online?  More than likely, they'll abandon the transaction all together and look elsewhere.

Perhaps a more proactive way of targeting sales opportunities vs. support and tracking would benefit the company more than forcing all customers down a single path?  Ultimately, when it comes to long-term satisfaction and customer experience, denying customers their preferred channel could be a risky bet.  What do you think?