Firm makes customers its priority New - company in Urbana offers Net managementUrbana, IL, May 2, 1999 – What if you emailed a company about a product you might like to buy and had to wait a week for a reply? Would you take your business elsewhere? Scott Whitsitt contends many companies are losing sales by the hour because their Web site visitors aren’t getting good, prompt service.
He put his premise to work in a new company, One-to-One Service.com, in Urbana.
One-to-One, based on the south side of the University of Illinois campus in the Technology Commercialization Building, provides Internet customer service management to companies.
That includes everything from providing software to organize and speed up answers to incoming email to completely taking over online customer service operations for individual companies.
Whitsitt founded the business late last year, bringing a background in call center management and customer care from his former job as vice president of account management at ITDS, Inc.. ITDS is a large cellular-phone billing operation that also offers customer service software.
Whitsitt, president and majority owner of One-to-One, said he sees a big market for Internet customer service management.
One study projects that by 2001, nearly half the adults in the United States will have email access and that electronic commerce in the United States will grow from $43 billion in 1997 to $1.3 trillion in 2003.
Another study, looking at 125 top business Web sites, found 51 percent of them took longer than five days to answer customer email inquiries, or they never responded at all, or weren’t accessible by email.
Whitsitt said that’s unacceptable in this wired age.
Many companies are simply overwhelmed by the volume of email they-re getting, he said.
Many also are trying to handle online customer service with employees hired to respond to telephone inquiries, Whitsitt said. Those employees often have outgoing personalities that work well on the phone, but they lack the writing and organizational skills necessary to handle email.
What’s more, Whitsitt said, customer service call rooms traditionally respond to customers on a "first in, first out" basis. Calls are answered in order, and there’s no opportunity to prioritize them so the most important and pressing calls can be handled first.
Whitsitt says One-to-One’s software package, called "iService," addresses those problems by automatically routing email inquiries into various pools and assigning them priorities for response.
Some pre-programmed responses to frequently asked questions can be sent back to the customer automatically.
Some inquiries can be answered nearly as fast by using staff people to add personal notes or more information to pre-programmed responses, Whitsitt said.
"The idea is to reduce the personal time spent sorting and prioritizing, and use people time for a personal touch," he added.
One-to-One is both licensing its "iService" package to companies who want to run it themselves, or renting it to companies to run on One-to-One servers.
Or, come summer, companies will have a third option: contracting with One-to-One for their entire Internet service operation.
One-to-One is gearing up to recruit worldwide for more than 100 employees to work in a "virtual call center," responding to One-to-One clients’ email from their own homes.
The call center is expected to be up and running in about 60 days, and it will greatly expand One-to-One’s employment, which currently stands at about nine people, Whitsitt said.
With the entire online world as an employment base, Whitsitt said One-to-One plans to be choosy, hiring those with strong writing skills and expertise in areas that can benefit One-to-One’s future clients.
Some potential employee prospects are educated people who either can’t or don’t want to work away from home at the moment – stay-at-home moms with college degrees or retired professionals who don’t want to be tied down to an office.
To help make that remote work force feel lilke part of the company, Whitsitt said One-to-One is putting in place an online community with chat rooms and message boards for employees to communicate with each other and share their hobbies and interests.
He hopes to match those interests with incoming One-to-One clients – say, a One-to-One employee who trains dogs could be assigned to handle email inquiries for a dog food company.
The iService software also includes two components that can be used as stand-alone tools.
One is "iSurvey," in which One-to-One can survey clients’ customers via email to measure the effectiveness of the Web site, the interest in product offerings and other topics.
The other tool, "iCentives," provides a direct-marketing service in which promotions may be included with responses to email messages.
Whitsitt said he’s seen new market research projecting that 25 percent of all customer inquiries and contacts will be made via email and other Web forms by 2001.
The online book sales venture, barnesandnoble.com, launched jointly by Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann, a German media company, can testify to the growth already taking place.
The company did $70.2 million in sales last year, up 381 percent from the previous year, said Lisa Lanspery, spokeswoman at barnesandnoble.com.
Lanspery said the company’s email inquiries are sorted by people who route them to executives for individual replies. Many answers go out within 24 hours, but "it depends on the question," she said.
"We always want to satisfy our customers," Lanspery added. "Making sure we give them the correct answer is also important. We will, at least, respond in a reasonable amount of time."
About One-to-One Service.comOne-to-One Service.com is a leading provider of web-based email response management and customer interaction software (iService) that is easy to implement and enhances each customer interaction. iService routes and manages customer email inquiries, captures a complete history of every customer interaction, provides a powerful self-help web site, and includes integrated email marketing modules (iCentives®). iService is available as an on-demand or on-premise solution and can be easily integrated with your existing web site.
Formed in 1997, One-to-One Service.com is a veteran in the email response management and eCRM industry. Located in Champaign, Illinois, One-to-One Service.com can be reached at 217.398.MAIL (6245) or on the Web at www.1to1service.com.
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iService, iCentives, the One-to-One Service.com logo, and the name One-to-One Service.com are registered trademarks of One-to-One Service.com, Inc.
For more information contact:
Scott Whitsitt
One-to-One Service.com
(217) 398-6245, ext. 121