From my experience, customer service is a game of potluck on the Internet.

Some companies are great at it, others are so-so while the rest are simply terrible.

In the fantastic group is Master Lock Co. I brought over a combination lock to France that I had purchased in Bermuda and somehow lost the combination.

On a whim I looked up Master Lock on the Internet and e-mailed them about the problem. Within a day Master Lock informed me that the matter had been referred to their company in France. I was sent instructions after which I took a digital photo of the closed lock and the serial number as proof and e-mailed that to them. The company then sent me the combination. Wow! Another good company was HMV in the UK through which I ordered a CD for my mother-in-law. Their site lacked a phone number and didn't have descriptions for the CDs or what songs were on them (for that I looked up CDNow but ordered through HMV which shipped from the UK and was therefore cheaper).

I sent an e-mail off complaining about these faults -- and received an immediate and lengthy reply that the faults were being corrected as the site had just been established. Now I like that response. They still don't have the contact phone number handy, but the titles of songs are now available.

Strange.

In my bad books are OneTel.com, a telecommunications provider, and (surprisingly) America Online France which put me on hold for 20 minutes. I was also transferred to four different customer representatives before I put the phone down in frustration.

There are a host of others who didn't respond to my requests or didn't have a phone number to call. My business was there for the taking and they mostly blew a simple procedure.

A recent Gartner Group study paints a picture which seems to mostly fit my experience. The study captures what many companies on the Internet are failing to do and serves as a map for those who want to attract and keep customers.

Gartner researched 50 top Internet retail sites and assessed what it labels as the quality of their customer relationship management (CRM). None of the sites received either an excellent or good rating and less than a quarter were considered average. Of the companies researched 23 percent received an "average score", 73 percent got a "Fair'' grade and the remaining four percent were "Poor''.

Much of the efforts at CRM were considered "lip service'' by the group since only ten percent of sites allowed customers to track inquiries through to resolution, six percent offered a feature allowing customers to ask the retailer to call them, 24 percent had instant messaging, and what I consider an Internet crime, only 28 percent even acknowledged that an e-mail inquiry was received.

Of the sites surveyed, half were pure Internet companies while the rest were traditional companies opening a storefront on the Internet -- so called click-and-mortar. The Gartner Group found the pure-plays were more adept at CRM than the traditionally based retailers.

And here's the danger for those companies in Bermuda looking to get retail sales from the Internet: "Most retail call centres treat Internet customers like strangers," the Gartner Group stated.

"Marketers are not integrating their websites and call centres and when disappointed customers call, the representatives are blind to their web activities and transactions.'' The message here is retailers must devote the resources necessary to support a site and don't have it just as an add-on adjunct to the business, because that's where the division will remain -- as an afterthought that's a cash burner rather than a money earner.

My computer is being used to search for life in outer space. Yes, I'm a fan of the SETI yhome project, a public computing project that scans radio signals from space for signs of alien life using hundreds of thousands of home computers worldwide.

The program takes the place of a screensaver, that first downloads a package of data to be analysed from a computer in Berkeley, California. The program kicks in when your computer is not active. Each package requires about 17 hours of analysis that gets sent back to the SETI headquarters. You then get automatically get another chunk of radio data to analyse.

The concept of using spare CPU cycles on desktop PCs to hunt through radio signals beamed at earth for signs of alien intelligence is a great one. The idea of participating in a scientific project has attracted 2.2 million users.

The data has been accumulated from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

I can report I haven't found any sign of alien life yet, but while I'm having a bottle of wine you can rest assured that I'm working on it.

You can download the software at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. The project also offers add on software called Distant Suns (www.distantsuns.com) which will give you a mapped view of the stars and the horizon from your location anywhere on Earth. It's a wonderful piece of software.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin yhotmail.com or (33) 467901474.