SCIENCE

TORONTO, CANADA -- WiseUncle Inc., an artificial intelligence software company based in Toronto, uses a powerful new approach to building its technology solutions: behavioral science. In an article published recently in Harvard Business Review - entitled 'Want to Perfect Your Company's Service? Use Behavioral Science' - Richard B. Chase and Sriram Dasu discussed the importance of behavioral science in commerce. They demonstrated how understanding "the underlying psychology of service encounters" can help companies greatly improve their customer service. WiseUncle has gone one step further, applying behavioral science expertise to build a "guided selling" tool that lets companies help their potential customers make complex buying decisions. "Online commerce, as it stands today, is rotten root to limb. Without substantive innovation in the market, online commerce will fail to live up to its promise and potential," says WiseUncle president Darrin Rowsell, who founded the company with partners Rishi Dean, a University of Waterloo alumnus, and Dr. J. Edward Russo, a Cornell University professor and renowned expert in behavioral science. The three came together from their respective business, technology and academic perspectives to build behavioral science based software products. "Buying online is especially problematic for complex products," states Rowsell. "Making an intelligent buying decision about a PC, for instance, is very difficult if you don't know what RAM is, or that RAM works with the processor to make your PC faster. And quite frankly, most people don't have that kind of knowledge. Those customers need help making their decision, because if they can't decide, they're not going to buy." "Right now, that kind of help isn't available online, which is why selling over the Internet has thus far has been generally restricted to order- taking - accepting and processing transactions," adds Rowsell. "That's fine for people who already know exactly what they want - buying a specific book, for example. But e-commerce is terrible at helping people make buying decisions for more complex products. This has been frustrating for buyers - be they consumers or corporate purchasers - and disappointing for vendors." The prevalent thinking on the Net is 'get the customer out of the store as fast as possible.' This contravenes everything we know about retail selling, and more importantly, everything we know about how people actually behave. Chase and Dasu note that "people who are mentally engaged in a task don't notice how long it takes," and that "the pleasurable content of the experience and how it is arranged - rather than how long it takes - seems to dominate people's assessment (of the experience)." People will stay in a store - or on a website - as long as they are being helped and are getting value out of the experience. And providing value means far more than allowing users to scroll through a virtual warehouse. Russo, WiseUncle's Chief Scientific Advisor, notes that "what WiseUncle is doing represents a fundamental re-evaluation of approach" to online selling. For example, he explains that a conventional online approach is questionnaires. "Users hate questionnaires," says Russo, a Professor of Marketing & Behavioral Science at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell, who has been studying decision-making for nearly 40 years. "They can hardly wait to get through them, finishing them in the hope that something useful to them will fall out at the end." Many online sellers realize this, so their philosophy has been "shorter is better." One online seller of PCs went so far as to recommend the best system for a customer based on a two-question survey. WiseUncle's approach, creating an intelligent dialog with a trusted advisor, has the opposite effect on users. Users can immediately see how their interaction with the software is extremely helpful to them. As a result, they do not feel that answering 15 or 20 questions takes up too much of their time. Indeed, the average user prefers more rather than fewer questions, a result that Russo notes is "unheard of with existing approaches to guided selling." "One of the consequences of the Internet is an imbalance between information and advice," notes Russo. "The key is to help the user bridge the gap between their needs - which they know - and the best product - which is what they need to know." That requires sophisticated technology with an inherent understanding of how people think and act. That's why behavioral science is critical to customer service, especially online. "You want the technology to adapt to the customers, not the other way around," argues Russo. WiseUncle's guided-selling tool, Advisor, comes in two categories. One suite of solutions is designed for vendors of complex products, such as computers, automobiles, industrial machinery, and financial services. A second version is designed for vendors of products with less complexity, including consumer electronics, appliances, wireless phones, and perfume. Advisor represents a unique fusion of behavioral science and artificial intelligence technology. For online buyers, Advisor serves as an easy, helpful guide through the process of a purchase decision. For online sellers - WiseUncle's clients - the benefits of Advisor are significant, including increased conversion rates of browsers to buyers, decreased telephone support costs, and decreased rates of goods returned. For additional information visit www.wiseuncle.com