Today’s Web retailers are increasingly wise to the impatience and fickleness of many online shoppers. Numerous studies report shopping cart abandonment rates of 20% to 60% per transaction. That's why retailers are investing in improved customer care technologies such as Internet telephone, dynamic lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs), and text chat systems to get customers the answers they need to buy goods right away. Retailers are also paying to integrate previously disparate e-mail, phone, and chat systems. Integration means shorter response times, which can lead to greater sales.

In the cruise industry, quick responses to potential cruise buyers means everything. That’s because booking a cruise is an impulse buy, says Mike Dauberman, Senior Vice President of British Operations of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Uniglobe.com of Canada, a subsidiary of Uniglobe Travel (International). Dauberman, who works at the U.S. headquarters in Renton, Washington, says, "If you can grab a customer while they're on the peak of interest in a cruise, they're considerably more likely to buy it".

That’s why Uniglobe tries to respond to every customer e-mail within twenty minutes and to have phone representatives standing by to answer phone calls. But in mid-1999, the company was growing quickly, and the twenty-minute mark was hard to maintain. With Y2k approaching and Uniglobe's call centre nearing the end of its five year amortization, Dauberman says that he wanted an all-in-one call centre that would route not just incoming phone calls but also chat and e-mail to all its agents' desks, one at a time. So now, if an agent doesn’t have any phone calls in his queue, the software assigns him a text chat or e-mail.

Today Uniglobe's goal is to have a customer care system that enables it to staff its call centre with people who only need to know how to use to use Microsoft Outlook. "My call centre staff isn’t technical. If they can use e-mail, they can use our call centre," he says.

Other companies are taking the plunge into voice-over IP (a way to converse with another online user by telephone via an Internet connection, while also browsing the same Web pages). Visitors to the Web site of Allfirst Bank, a subsidiary of Allfirst Financial in Baltimore, can use their PCs to carry out telephone conversations with the banks sales people. Java Script software, downloaded when the user hits a "live talk" link, creates a voice-over IP session. But users need a computer equipped with a sound card, a microphone, speaker, and a fast modem.

The aim is to make customer's experience more intimate. "We're trying to humanise what we do. You go back to the brand. Chat was a way of humanising customer care, but chat is a heck of a way of humanising it," says Bill Murray, Senior Vice President of E-commerce at Allfirst. Murray says he was drawn to voice-over IP because unlike shopping for CDs or books, people want to talk over their options before signing up for new bank accounts.

The bottom line for many E-business companies is reflected in a survey conducted by Meta Group that indicates that live customer service can cut shopping cart abandonment rates by 10% to 45% because company representatives can walk customers through problems or immediately answer their questions.