Understanding customer care in a store

Professional Edition onlyBusiness Edition onlyThe customer care feature in WebSphere Commerce provides real-time customer service support by way of a synchronous text interface using the Lotus Sametime server. When customer care is enabled in your store, a customer may enter the store, click on a link and connect to a Customer Service Representative (CSR). Then, the customer can can communicate with a CSR over the Internet.

Note: This topic covers how to enable customer care in your store. However, before you can enable customer care in your store, you must first install a Sametime server and configure it to work with WebSphere Commerce. For more information, see the WebSphere Commerce Additional Software guide. If the Sametime server does not use the same LDAP server as WebSphere Commerce, you must also register CSRs in the Administration Console to enable them to use customer care. For more information on this task, as well as the overall concepts of customer care and how a CSR uses customer care, see the WebSphere Commerce online help.

Note:

You can enable customer care in your store quickly and easily using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, if you create your store based on one of the following starter stores:

After publishing the store using the Publish wizard, open the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, select the Stores menu, then select Change Flow and enable the customer care features.

However, if you do not create your store using a starter store as a base, you will have to do some work to enable customer care in your store. The remainder of this topic discusses the concepts and steps necessary to enable customer care in a store not based on one of the samples.

Notes:
  1. The starter stores Business Edition onlyAdvanced B2B direct and FashionFlow demonstrate how customer care should be implemented, and provide the code that you can use in your store to enable customer care. This topic will refer to examples from these two stores to illustrate how to enable customer care in your store. Ensure that you have the latest version of the starter stores when reading this topic.
  2. To support backward compatibility and the built-in JVM that comes with Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers version 4.x, the applet code is developed with JDK1.1 and AWT components. Therefore some of the features available with JDK 1.2 or higher (including language support, BI-direction support, and accessibility) will not be available or fully supported. Sun Java plug-ins and Netscape browser 6 and 7 are not supported.

When a customer selects the customer care link, for example, Live Chat with Customer Assistant, in a store enabled with customer care, an applet containing the chat window is launched. This applet is run within a hidden frameset that does not interfere with the look and feel of the site.

The following diagram illustrates the composition of the frameset.

This image shows the relationship between your store page, and three hidden frames required to enable Sametime. These frames are described in the following definition list.

The frameset includes four frames:

Main
The frame that contains the content for your store, including the files that create the store pages, that is the files that create the body of the page, the header and footer files, and the sidebar files. The contents of this frame are visible to the visitors to your store. Note that the main frame contains the following connections to the Sametime frame: a link to customer care and monitoring information. Monitoring information is discussed in more detail in Monitoring customers using customer care.
Sametime
The frame that contains the customer care applet. This frame is not visible to your store's visitors. However, when a customer clicks on the link to launch the applet, the customer will see the customer care window. This frame also pushes information to the main frame, through the page push feature.
jsframe
The frame that confirms that the applet has been loaded properly. The contents of this frame do not display to customers.
StUpdate
The frame refreshes the customer's information, including the customer's name or ID.

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