A recent audio story on marketplace (a show on National Public Radio) spotlighted Land’s End – the rugged/smart/ casual clothier known for its mitten and winter coats. Land’s End has been experimenting with a live, one-on-one customer service through its website. A shopper merely clicks on link and he/she is taken into a live video-chat with  a personal shopper. Lands’ End customer service manager Joan Conlin hopes that this new model of customer service will emulate “ have that person in retail store that’s helping you out”. In other words, consumers already expect a high level of customer service when shopping in real life. Isn’t about time we start fulfilling that expectation in the virtual world? The Lands’ End model is based on live video chat. VeriShow’s customer support platform can be customized, as some customers don’t want to be seen or don’t have reliable video/audio chat on their personal computer. VeriShow accounts for the variables. In fact, in the Lands’ End model, the shopper ran into a small snafu when her computer microphone was on mute. With VeriShow you can…

– See your customers’ facial expression and build trust

– Show products and services live, not just describe the

– Use annotation tools to walk customers through your product and related material

All in all, the meat is the numbers –

• Cyber Monday (the online shopping day that follows US Thanksgiving) in 2009 reached $887 million, up 5 percent from the previous year and matching the heaviest online spending day of record, Dec 9, 2008.
• The number of online buyers grew 6 percent to 8.7 million.

What will Cyber Monday look like in 2010? How you treat your online shopper matters.  VeriShow can help!