Developing Ask Anna’s knowledge base alone took two people six to eight weeks during the course of several months, says Robinson. The software development took four months. Robinson considers the development costs moderate and says a company looking to do the same can probably expect to pay less than $500,000. The investment in such a new technology has been worthwhile for Ikea. "We see our user counts constantly increasing," she says. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people use Ask Anna each day. In the year after the feature was first launched, Robinson says, call center volume grew a mere 7 percent, compared with 20 percent growth the previous year. Robinson also says Ask Anna has been "especially efficient for reducing incoming e-mails, which are most costly to manage." The software paid for itself in less than a year.

Now Ikea is expanding the database so that customers can get help assembling products, and is considering ways to have Anna answer people’s questions verbally to make the interaction more lifelike and conversational.

Even though Anna is totally 2D, customers seem to be impressed. Some users have even proposed marriage to Anna. "Several times," says Robinson. "People are connecting with Anna on that level. Part of the reason she gets those questions is people having fun and part of it is people thinking, You answered my question and you did OK, so let’s see what else you know."

The Benefits of Real-Time Analytics

Web analytics can help you pinpoint how to make your website more engaging and easier to use. There’s a host of products on the market that generate Web metrics, but few provide real-time data. And few go beyond traditional ways of measuring customer behavior, such as tracking clickstreams and page views, to tell you precisely what individual customers are doing or trying to do on your site. But Safeway.com has successfully used a new Web monitoring product that tracks individual user behavior on the Web in real-time in order to quickly diagnose usability problems and increase revenue.

Business Signatures’ Customer Intent Processor is one of a few new products that help companies identify what customers are trying to do on their websites in real-time. Safeway.com deployed Business Signatures’ software in November 2004. The software captures the entire HTTP stream that goes through a company’s network in real-time. It then matches those streams to sets of activities customers can engage in on a website, such as search, add to shopping cart, checkout, check account balance, or any series of activities or clicks a company wishes to track.