Reflect upon your experiences with electronic commerce (banking, Amazon, iTunes, etc) in light of these articles.
After reading all three articles, I felt like I was definitely not the only one who gets discouraged when trying to do purchases or ask questions online. Although, I would rather do what I need to do online because it is more convenient, it can also be a huge hassel when the system gets clogged, or my answers do not get answered. A key example of this is on credit card company websites like Capital One for instance. CapitalOne.com is not as easily set up for me (as the consumer) as I thought. About a week ago I was online and after about twenty minutes of searching for a way to cancel my account, I ended up having to call customer service which was a complete disaster. I was on hold more times than I can count and the representative ask me way too many questions and try over and over again to discourage me from cancelling.
I was most impressed with the Circuit city article because I did not know until I read it that Circuit City has their site set up similar to a MySpace in which customers and employees can interact and respond to one-another by posting to the site. Circuit City has its own online community and it seems to be working for them because the customers are getting involved and our making suggestions on to how they can better their service. I think this is what other companies should follow, especially banking and credit card companies. They need to have an interactive site where customers can ask questions and company workers can instantly reply. This seems much more efficient than using the telephone, but could also cause an overflow of people using it and not enough workers able to respond to this demand.
My advice and suggestions based off of my own peronal experience with online commerce is that companies should ONLY offer services that they can keep up with. All too often there are computer errors, long wait times, or no response to emails that I send out. This can be very discouraging!!
Questions:
1. Do you think having real life employees active online supporting / interacting with customers would be more helpful in serving their customers and promote their business?
2. Do you agree with what Circuit City has done in developing a social website for its company or is this too much like a social service rather than a business? Is it too much like Myspace, will people begin to meet and interact on this site for other reasons rather than just shopping?
I can completely relate to your bad experience with a Credit Card company online! And then to add insult to injury, having to call them on the phone. My experience was with Vonage. I sent them dozens of emails and finally ended up waiting on hold for about 45 minutes to speak to a customer service representative. My issue still didn’t get resolved. I wrote in my reflection of this week’s reading, that like you said, the convenience of shopping online is great, but when it’s bad, it’s really, really bad and can be quite a headache!
As you mentioned, I try to stick with using e-commerce sites that have been around a long time or seem to have some “muscle” behind them. I’ve had good luck with Amazon.com and Best Buy. I feel like sticking with the larger companies means that I have more recourse when (if…) things do go wrong during the transaction. I also try not to shop at service-based online companies because, as you mentioned with the Credit Card company, and I mentioned with Vonage, the customer service is really lacking online.