Will's Web Watch: Been let down by an e-tailer?

What can e-tailers do to keep customers happy and prevent churn? That depends on just what sort of products or services they sell, says Will Sturgeon.

Those of us who have regularly shopped online for some time now will have our favourite sites - be it a first port of call when booking flights or hotels, a first choice for CDs or DVDs, a specialist clothes store or other niche site (not necessarily of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink variety) which serves as evidence of how the internet has democratised the shopping experience.

And most of us will have come up against an instance when these favoured retailers have made a mistake, misplaced an order or otherwise let us down.

I know of many people, myself included, who have experienced the annoyance of Christmas presents arriving late, despite meeting Amazon's 'last delivery date' (by some days). So, on Christmas Eve you go to the shops and you buy the presents again and return Amazon's goods in the New Year once they've arrived... there are greater hardships of course but it's still a pain.

However, despite experiencing this first hand I've since continued to shop with Amazon.co.uk. Why? Because the service has otherwise been excellent and until I come up against something which outweighs the benefits I perceive of shopping with Amazon.co.uk, I will keep going back.

So the question, upon meeting with some degree of failure, becomes 'what do I do next?'. How much money have I spent with this site, how often have I used this service, how impeccable or otherwise has the service been to date, how necessary is it that I keep using this site, how compelling is the pricing? These are all questions we tend to ask as we work out what degree of 'acceptable fallibility' we allow the site.

For example, on a trip to Edinburgh last month, for the wedding of some good friends, I arrived at my hotel with about half an hour to spare due in part to weekend engineering works on the railway but also due, to some degree, to over-confidence of the 'plenty of time' variety on my part.

This is exactly the moment you don't need some other unforeseen problem to slow you down but sod's law being what it is I learned the hotel had no record of my booking, made through the website Totalstay.com. The hotel staff were able to rectify the problem but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

I'm still waiting (I suspect in vain) for an explanation as to what went wrong but whether it was the fault of Totalstay.com, or a third party, the fact remains they were my point of contact, they accepted payment and it's their reputation on the line.

And that reputation rises and falls with the quality of the customer experience.

The other question I must answer now is whether I use this company again. The background to this is that I have used Totaystay.com countless times for everything from large party stag dos in Brighton and Budapest to various trips to the US and across Europe.

This week I'm booking my summer holiday. In early February I wouldn't have hesitated to use Totalstay.com. Now it seems unlikely.

While I tolerate some percentage of problems with books, CDs and the like, or even higher priced items where time isn't such a factor, I find it far more difficult to rationalise away a dropped hotel booking.

I only single this company out because this example is illustrative of a wider issue - that a retailer is only as good as its last sale, to misappropriate a cliché.

In this case, a company I otherwise rated highly enough to recommend to other people let me down - just once - but because of the nature of what I'd booked and the circumstances, I'm unwilling to forgive that easily.

There are some purchases where there is a far lower threshold of 'acceptable fallibility'. In some cases it is 'zero'. And when the nature of ecommerce means your nearest competitor is never more than a click away, controlling the rate of customer churn can be a problem. (Read the results of a recent poll which illustrates exactly how likely customers are to switch.)

As such, e-tailers have to do what they can to make themselves 'unchurnable'. If the deal-breaker for the customer is, 'Is my hotel room ready?', then confirmation services and systems must be more robust. If the items for sale are likely to ship with a far higher 'acceptable fallibility' threshold, then ensure everything around that sale is working well - are the prices still compelling, is delivery quick, is the site easy to navigate, is the selection unrivalled?

Areas e-tailers should also consider are the effectiveness of their customer service, loyalty schemes (a great churn-buster which is yet to effectively transition from the high street to the internet) and after-sales care.

If you only have one shop in your village you have to be pretty disenfranchised before you start to boycott it. But where the internet is concerned we can afford to be far more fickle.

Retailers need to keep reminding themselves of this fact.

Will Sturgeon is managing editor at silicon.com