The Experienced Customer

P. Kelly Mooney is one click-happy, online-shopaholic. In fact, between December 1, 1998 and January 15, 1999, Mooney spent more than 300 hours roaming the cyber-aisles of 30 online retailers, purchasing anything and everything: books, perfume, wine, garden supplies, toys, jeans, CDs. But Mooney didn't spend much time evaluating all of this merchandise. As intelligence director for Resource Marketing Inc., a technology marketing and communications company based in Columbus, Ohio, Mooney was evaluating one thing only: the experience of shopping.

"Customer service is the online experience," says Mooney. "Online, no transaction is tangible. There's no friendly greeter at the front door, and there's no help desk at the back of the store. A customer is in a self-service environment. So retailers must know what the customer wants before she tells them. From start to finish, the experience is the only thing that matters."

Mooney, 35, has always taken shopping seriously. At Fitch Inc., an international design consultancy where she worked for nearly a decade, Mooney supervised the creative development of award-winning retail environments for such brands as Reebok, Hush Puppies, and Lee Apparel. Her recent online shopping spree was aimed at creating a data-rich, easy-to-understand tool to help her current clients come to terms with the harsh realities of customer service on the Web. But before she could educate those clients (which include such companies as the Limited, Hewlett-Packard, Drug Emporium, and Burton Snowboards), Mooney first had to educate herself: She spent six intense weeks on the Web, scoping out the promise and the performance of dozens of sites, calling customer-service numbers, sending out email inquiries, ordering and returning items, and complaining -- acting, in other words, like a normal customer.

Mooney then converted her findings into a personal, opinionated Internet-shopping audit: E-Commerce Analyst Watch 2.0. (Mooney's first audit, Analyst Watch 1.0, was conducted exclusively for the Limited, as part of the development effort for that company's superhyped, supersexy Victoria's Secret Web site.) Mooney's rating tool looks at more than 50 site attributes and groups them into nine areas of evaluation -- from prepurchase customer service, to gift giving, to special promotions, to the all-important, underexploited category of postpurchase follow-through. Armed with all of this data, Mooney awarded medals to each site: gold for an exceptional experience; silver for a good experience; and, for those bringing up the rear, bombs. She did not award any bronze medals: "There's little room for third place in the e-commerce world," she explains. Finally, Mooney named the joint winners of the award for "Best on the Web": Amazon.com and Garden.com.

To find out what works -- and what doesn't -- in the world of customer service on the Web, Net Company asked Mooney for a list of basic do's and don'ts. She offered five principles (along with a series of "sites that clicked" and "sites that crashed," all drawn from her Web-shopping experiences).

Don't just do it.

The worst thing that a retailer can do is to throw its catalog on the Web and call that an online-retailing strategy. In fact, doing that can do more to break a brand than to build it. Take Dean & Deluca, which is a chain of gourmet-food shops. When I visit one of its stores, I salivate over its products: I want to eat every cheese wheel in sight. But when I go online, I wonder, "Is this the same company?" The Dean & Deluca site is boring and uninspired: I feel like I'm buying parts for my car. The flip side of that experience is a site like levi.com. The way that Levi's sells jeans on the Web is incredibly well thought-out. Information is accessible and easy to follow. If I want to see color swatches, I can see them big or small. I can see both the front and the back of a product. What a concept! Levi.com also has a feature called "My Collection" -- a personal Web page where customers can keep a list of their favorite items. The look-and-feel of the site fits the Levi's brand like, well, a good pair of jeans.

Don't let your seams show.

Real customer service is about reaching and satisfying customers in every retail environment -- not only online and not only in the brick-and-mortar world. Retailers have to figure out how to guide their customers seamlessly, and according to each customer's needs, through various retailing experiences. Customers couldn't care less that Barnes & Noble and barnesandnoble.com are separate divisions with separate P&Ls. A customer who buys a book online expects to be able to return it to an actual store. But few retailers allow such returns. The Gap is one of the few exceptions: It looks at each merchandise return as an opportunity for another sale -- and, in the process, it creates a seamless experience for the customer.