IT Week: What does your job as vice president of product strategy at
e-commerce software firm ATG entail?
Barry Coleman: I spend a lot of time talking to customers about
their problems and then looking at how that could fit with the technology and if
we have a feature set that could solve them. As our customers try to grow
revenue, reduce costs and improve the consumer experience, I’m looking at what
technology ATG could bring into the mix to enable this.
What are the main challenges that your customers face?
One of the main issues is delivering personalisation. We spend an awful lot of
time automating personalisation firms are really trying to ramp up the
potential for revenue so they want these processes automated. On the other side
is the customer experience. Often when customers go from the web to the call
centre they end up having to repeat certain processes. We recently put out a
product designed to make the call centre an extension of the web site.
Why is this so important?
We see call centre operatives as an extension of the web site. The agent should
be able to see everything that’s online. We’re really starting to see
multi-channel efforts. There may be five- or six-times more things that can’t be
stocked in store so firms are making the site the vehicle to find items and then
make it a seamless experience. You should be able to go to a store and have
three items in hand you want to buy and two more [you’ve found online] and be
able to purchase them together.
Has the advent of Web 2.0 technologies changed e-commerce?
Yes, it’s all about a rich user experience an area we’re driving towards.
We’re using Ajax to ease the checkout process because a lot of dropouts occur
here. It can help to give the customer the information they need at the right
time. Also, if you’re choosing a product and there are several variables, it
allows firms to show only those in stock: as you make selections it can make
quick calls to the back end and not allow the customer to pick something that
cannot be fulfilled. It can also enable single-page checkouts, with expandable
sections allowing users to fill in all their information without having to leave
the page.
What e-commerce trends will we see in the future?
Bringing the right products to the right people at the right time and helping
people get to the right channel will be important. Soon you will see more
click-to-call and click-to-chat technologies and more collaboration. For
example, if a pair of friends live two time zones away from each other but like
to shop together, let’s give them the tools to do that, and then use the
information for product suggestions.
