Health Blog

Several weeks after the holiday shopping season, horror stories
continue about the difficulties people are having on-line. Problems
returning stock, obtaining refunds or simply getting customer support
suggest that companies involved in electronic commerce have a lot to
learn.

This isn’t surprising. Although many organizations are eager to cash
in on the e-business craze, they often rush to put the technology in
place and forget that it is people who have to make it work. Consider
this dismal statistic: U.S.-based Jupiter Communications recently
reported that more than half of the top on-line commerce sites weren’t
able to answer e-mail within five days of a customer query. Obviously,
a lot of firms haven’t smoothly integrated their Web sites into
traditional customer support channels.

How can a company be successful in the era of e-business if it can’t
handle the simplest task?

The business world is discovering that while handling e-commerce
technology may be easy, the people issues aren’t. It takes
tremendous time and effort to deal with staff, distribution channels,
trading partners, suppliers and everyone else with whom a company
has a relationship when implementing an on-line strategy.

Changing day-to-day procedures of an organization — from the most
straightforward tasks to the most complex of workflow systems — can
be a massive challenge.

The difficulty was captured in my experience with an airline a few
years ago. I had begun to buy all of my tickets on-line. At one point, I
had to cancel a booking and presumed that all I had to do was revisit
the airline’s Web site, access my ticket details and choose the
cancel button.

You’d think that this would trigger a chain of events that would result
in a refund on my credit card statement.

Far from it. After two months of not seeing a credit, I called the
airline. After investigating for a while, the customer support person
advised me that when cancelling a ticket, just visiting the Web site
wasn’t enough — I had to call the airline as well.

Nowhere on the Web site did it say this was necessary. How could I
get a refund? The person on the phone didn’t know, but gave me
another number to call.

It then took seven more phone calls to figure out how to get my
credit. At one point, I talked to someone in the accounting
department who said that I shouldn’t be buying tickets over the
Internet at all, because it “made things too complicated.” This from a
representative of a company that was then running ads encouraging
people to buy tickets on-line.

If an organization doesn’t ensure that its entire staff is fully aware of
the intricacies of its e-business initiative, and if it doesn’t smoothly
integrate its e-commerce efforts into all of its business procedures, it
might as well not bother at all.

To compound the problem, many e-commerce initiatives can have a
negative impact on the very staff who must be in tune with what is
happening. They may view the initiative as a threat to their livelihood
and likely work against its success, rather than for it.

Consider the typical insurance company, which is looking to sell
policies directly on-line. In doing so, it is likely to greatly upset those
in its distribution channel (that is, its agents and brokers), who will
view the insurer as competing directly with them.

The company must balance its efforts to implement a direct sales
strategy with the need to alleviate the concerns within its existing
channel — not an easy task.

Resistance to the change posed by e-business is likely the biggest
problem that organizations face.

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Nail Care by Candice