With U.S. online retail sales for Q1 2007 totaling $31.5 billion, a study has revealed that "U.S. online retailers are failing in key areas of customer service, which has the potential to be devastating to the online retail market which is forecasted to reach $329 billion in 2010," according to Talisma officials.

In a mystery shopper exercise conducted from April to June 2007, 34 percent of e-mails went unanswered by what Talisma officials describe as "100 of America's top online retailers," with just over 50 percent of responses providing accurate and complete information.

The findings of the audit are highlighted in a downloadable report published by customer service and Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software vendor Talisma.

Talisma asked its targets "What credit or debit cards can I use to make payment," and "what are your shipment charges?" The audit then awarded each online retailer a score out of 100, based on a range of customer service criteria including speed of response, accuracy, completeness of information provided, and the personalization of interactions.

Ninety-three percent of companies audited responded to phone queries within 30 seconds, but only five percent were able to communicate with personalized content -- by referring to caller ID or a customer profile. 51 percent of e-mails and 72 percent of phone calls answered provided accurate information.

Of the 230 million U.S. Internet users, Talisma officials say, "many are well versed with the use of chat, and prefer to communicate with online retailers that way. However, only 30 percent of the audited retailers are able to accommodate that channel preference." Even worse, they charge, for those customers who prefer to find information themselves before contacting customer service "a mere three percent of online retailers offer full-fledged Web self-service."

On the bright side, every one of the audited companies provided access to phone-based customer service, with 95 percent providing it for free, and 96 percent provided access to e-mail.

In August Talisma's Chief Technology Officer, Brad Birnbaum, explained that the vendor's recent decision to add proactive service and sales to their company’s focus "was the next logical strategic move for Talisma."

"We’ve offered proactive service capabilities to our customers in the past, but with CIM 8.0 we enhanced those capabilities and added new features to enable agents to not only improve support but to take advantage of sales opportunities," Birnbaum said:

"For example, proactive support is an agent sending a notification to a customer before the power is scheduled to go out. Proactive sales is an agent sending a customer a personalized product offer while monitoring the customer’s shopping behavior."

This is at the heart of what makes CIM different from CRM, Birnbaum says: "We’re not a CRM vendor, but a vendor of Customer Interaction Management. The right time for businesses to start looking for CIM tools is when they realize their interactions with their customers need to be managed in order to provide an exceptional customer experience."

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.