Customer Centric

After the era of Q&A sections on websites and call centers, we can see an increasing demand from consumers to get a personalized support directly on-line.

The main question is about the best way to do it.

It appears that an effective personalization and support is hardly achievable without having a human being behind the scene.
However, there are some community based tools which could provide a credible support without having an army of customer support executives behind their screen.

You have hereafter some examples of different brands or services interacting with their clients:

Anna is helping you in the virtual store of Ikea…
It is interactive but in an automated way so it is not yet a great experience.
You can try the question “What is your favorite meal?” or other ones

…Sam is the expert of the weather forecast in your city…

Done by the company: Activa Multimedia Digital

…If you want to go on a virtual trip into the game World Of Warcraft, this company can help you: Synthravels
They offer the opportunity to fix an appointment with an Avatar from the virtual world you have chosen and get introduced to the game.

I believe more in solutions where the support could be based on a live interaction with a community of users. It could be a sophisticated evolution of the product rating or forums done today by on-line users.

The German company Weblin has a very interesting and powerful solution. You can set-up your own Avatar and going from one website to another one.  You will be seen and interacting only with other Weblin’s avatars (the webmaster of the website or normal visitors cannot see you).

This approach could be very efficient even if some adjustments will need to be considered.

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