Early visitors to the Garden Escape, Inc. Web site, launched last March, could order Purple Dome Asters, learn how to rid themselves of pesky mealy bugs or create a custom garden plot for their desktops.

In fact, they could do just about everything but smell the roses -- or reach the company by phone on evenings or weekends.

Although the Net never closes, the Garden Escape offices did. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.Central Time, employees fielded phone calls on an 800 line, answered questions, and took orders for bulbs, gardening tools and greenhouses.

But after business hours, calls rolled from the customer service desk into a voice mailbox. And to Garden Escape's dismay, more than 90 percent of these after-hour calls were hang-ups.

"People didn't feel comfortable leaving their name and phone number on an 800 line," recalls Lisa Sharples, the company's vice president of marketing. Also, West Coast shoppers, an important market for the company, were two hours out of sync. And highest traffic times on the Garden Escape Web site were evenings from 7 to midnight, early mornings and weekends.

Catering to the Cyber-Client
The World Wide Web, it seems, is about instant gratification and after-hours shopping.

Turning site visitors into shoppers -- and repeat buyers at that-requires more than a colorful cybergarden. It takes customer-service savvy.

"Our target audiences have higher expectations for the Internet ... than they do for traditional channels of distribution in terms of accessibility, information, convenience and ease of use," Sharples says.

The company used focus groups, email and phone chats with customers to probe its customer-service glitch. More than half of the people logging on, it turns out, weren't even Internet-savvy. "They had just as many questions about using the Internet as they did about our product lines," Sharples recalls.

Online shoppers won't beat a path to your Web site if they can't find it. Some potential customers who read about Garden Escape in a newspaper or magazine had difficulty locating the company on the Net or negotiating the site once they'd landed there.

To assist these newbies, Garden Escape developed an online tutorial about chats, search engines and the like.

In September, with the fall planting season looming and sales spurting upward, Garden Escape turned over customer support to DBM, a technically savvy, California-based firm that works for high-tech giants such as Silicon Graphics. DBM now provides 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week phone assistance and ordering capability for Garden Escape customers.

When Garden Escape first opened, some customers cited security as an issue, and refused to send their Visa card number hurtling through cyberspace. When Garden Escape first opened, encryption wasn't as widely used as it is now, so to compensate for the lack of off-the-shelf security software, the company developed its own systems, which scramble messages en route to the authorized reader. Alternately, customers may pay via fax or send a check.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
But even taking care of security and technical matters doesn't let you off the hook: Customers continue to want instant answers to everything.

Consider the gardener who wants to order an antique rose, but wants to override the shipping time listed in the online catalogue. He's in Maine and figures the dates specified on the Web would work better for New Mexico.

"If you want to plant your antique roses in October and the shipping says November, you'll go buy them somewhere else," Sharples says. She reckons that 24-7 phone support can clinch these types of sales.

In a new medium where fly-by-nighters abound, "you have to keep people updated on their order, especially during the Christmas season," she notes. To keep buyers in the loop, the company sends an email confirmation upon receipt of an order, and follow-up status information on a weekly basis.

In another attempt to go catalog sellers several steps better, Garden Escape has an email gift-reminder system for frequent users. When that all-important graduation, anniversary, or housewarming celebration approaches, the company sends a message along with suggestions for great gardening presents.

One asset of on-line selling -- accessibility to inventory information -- can also be a liability. Customers sometimes gripe when they log onto Garden Escape and find a certain daffodil bulb is listed as "out of stock." In a neighborhood retail store, customers don't know what they're missing. To alleviate buyer angst, Garden Escape now advises consumers, "press here -- and we'll send you an email when the item's back in stock."

Even with a selection of over 6,000 products on offer, the company can't possibly carry everything a grower wants. So to establish itself as "the ultimate gardening resource," Sharples explains, Garden Escape offers a personal shopping service. For a $10 fee the company will locate any product it doesn't carry in an off-line gardening catalog.

This personal service also helps the company fine-tune its own product lines. "If we get five requests for something we don't carry," Sharples says, "we know we should carry it next season."

Currently, the site has over 20,000 registered users, and 66 percent of them are women. The average user age is 30 to 50, but "we're seeing a lot more seniors coming on," said Sharples. So far, Garden Escape has raised $3 million in venture capital funding, from Austin Ventures and Philip Smith, and is now beginning its third round of investment. If all goes well, profitability is projected for the 1997-98 time frame.

5 Tips to Increase Customer Service

Remember that your customers can come from anywhere in the world. Keep different time zones in mind. Make your site easy to use for your target audience. When a customer service problem arises, don't be afraid to turn it over to a subcontractor if you don't have the talent in-house. Be pro-active in addressing customers' concerns. Design the site to conform to the customers' needs.