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5

 

Have a vision . . .  

‘Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger’, comments Tony.

● 

Does your company vision have real meaning? Without it, there little chance of achieving any of the 

above.

● 

‘What would you be passionate about doing for 10 years even if you never made a dime?’

Source: Hsieh (2010).

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Part 2  Strategy and applications

Of the companies that did respond, there was a difference in responsiveness (excluding 

immediately delivered automated responses) from 8 minutes to over 19 working days! While 

the mean overall was 2 working days, 5 hours and 11 minutes, the median across all sectors 

(on the basis of the fastest 50% of responses received) was 1 working day and 34 minutes. The 

median result suggests that response within one working day represents best practice and 

could form the basis for consumer expectations.

Responsiveness is also indicated by the performance of the website – the time it takes for a 

page request to be delivered to the user’s browser as a page impression. Since there is a wide 

variability in the delivery of information and hence service quality from web servers hosted 

at ISPs, companies should be careful to monitor this and specify levels of quality with suppli-

ers in service level agreements (SLAs). Zona Research (1999) conducted an analysis that sug-

gests that $4.35 billion may be lost in e-commerce revenues due to customer ‘bailout’ when 

customers are unwilling to wait for information to download. The report notes that many 

customers may not be prepared to wait longer than eight seconds!

Effective fulfilment is also an essential part of responsiveness (as explained in Chapter 7).

Assurance

In an email context, assurance can best be considered as the quality of response. In the survey 

reported by Chaffey and Edgar (2000), of 180 responses received, 91% delivered a personal-

ised human response with 9% delivering an automated response which did not address the 

individual enquiry; 40% of responses answered or referred to all three questions with 10% 

answering two questions, and 22% one. Overall, 38% did not answer any of the specific ques-

tions posed!

A further assurance concern of e-commerce websites is the privacy and security of cus-

tomer information. A company that subscribes to the Internet Shopping Is Safe – ISIS (

www.

imrg.org/is

) – merchant accreditation or TRUSTe principles (

www.truste.org

) will provide 

better assurance than one that does not. The following actions can be suggested to achieve 

assurance in an e-commerce site: