Here's How You Can Bring the Power of Groupware and the Internet to Bear on One of the Thorniest and Costliest of Business Problems--Customer Relations.

How would you like to more business with your current customers, dramatically boost customer loyalty, and at the same time lower the cost of customer relations?

I'm sure you'd like to do all of these things. Who wouldn't? But how could you possibly do more than you're already doing without spending a lot more time and money?

The answer (or part of the answer) lies in groupware and the Internet. Several groupware and Internet products have recently been introduced that can help you improve almost every aspect of your customer relations, including sales and ordering, invoicing and delivering, and service and support.

Don't underestimate the importance of better customer relations; even a small improvement can influence your bottom line. Profit margins are thinner than ever, competition is keener, and product development cycles are shorter. After years of reengineering, most companies have slimmed down to the bone, but they haven't devoted enough attention to customer relations; most people would agree that there's still room for improvement here. Consider the following:

• A company typically loses 15 to 35 percent of its customers each year, with more than two-thirds of the deserters leaving because of the firm's indifference to them (Harvard Business Review, 1995).

• A mere 5 percent reduction in customer defections can result in a 25 to 85 percent hike in profit (Harvard Business Review, 1995).

• A managed approach to customer service can raise sale 15 to 35 percent without increasing costs ("World Class Customer Management," Ernst and Young presentation, 1996).

How can you keep more customers and rap the benefits? Here are some of the things that you and your company can do:

• Collect timely, detailed information about your customers, such as buying habits, product needs, and service and support expectations.

• Engage your customers in a continuing dialogue about new products, service and support, and other issues.

• Automate much of you interaction with customers, including selling, service and support, and quality assurance.

In the rest of this article, I'll introduce you to various groupware and Internet products that will help you do these things. I"ll offer precise suggestions as to how you can use these products to bring about a dramatic improvement in customer relations and thus enlarge the number on your bottom line.

Collecting Customer Information

It's almost always been a difficult and expensive task to gather detailed, up-to-date information about customers. Thanks to software from Decisive Technology Corp, in Palo Alto, Calif., the job is now easier and less costly. Decisive makes software that automates the information-gathering process. Called Decisive Survey, it enables you to create a customer survey in a Windows application and automatically e-mail it to a list of recipients. You don't have to tabulate the results yourself: the software does that automatically, presenting the results graphically. Decisive Survey works with Internet browsers as well as with most e-mail systems, and customers can use Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computers.

You don't always have to go to your customers to get information about them; you can also wait until they've come to you--to your Web site, that is. Your site can be a treasure trove of customer data. By monitoring site activity, for example, you can judge the effectiveness of your site, the attractiveness of the products and services publicized there, and the demographic characteristics of your site's visitors.

There are several site-monitoring applications on the market. one of the more capable and comprehensive of these applications is the Aria World Wide Web Recording and Reporting System, which can track the state of any Web site by the millisecond, hour, or day and generate usage reports and graphs. Armed with these reports, you can respond not only to differential traffic loads but to different users as well, dynamically personalizing the site's content and thus encouraging longer visits. In addition, you can feed data directly to various departments, such as marketing and sales, enabling these groups to stay abreast of customer preferences and changing markets. Produced by Andromedia in San Francisco, Calif., Aria supports browsers from Netscape, Microsoft Mosaic, and Spyglass and runs on Solaris 2.x and NT servers.

Engaging in a Dialogue with Your Customers

There will be times, of course, when you'll want to do more than gather information about your customers--when you'll want to involve them in an ongoing conversation. You may, for example, want to get their suggestions for new products and features. You could always invite your customers to your office for a meeting or call them up on the phone, but face-to-face meetings are time consuming and hard to arrange (free pizza isn't as great an enticement as many managers think), and some people are next to impossible to reach on the phone.

A Santa Clara, California, company named WebFlow makes an application that's well suited to fostering such a dialogue. Using SamePage (reviewed in the July/August issue), you can put any kind of document, such as the proposed specifications of a new product, on an Internet server. Using a Web browser, your customers can read the document at their leisure and insert comments at any spot. You can read their remarks at any time, and insert your comments right after theirs. And they in turn can respond to yours, ad infinitum--and no one has to leave their office. Since a SamePage document can contain images, graphics, and spreadsheets, it can be used to show as well as to tell.

For example, you can use SamePage to manage communication between a product development group and a customer steering committee. All (or almost all) of their dealing can be conducted online, where a comprehensive product development plan with timelines, benchmarks, feature lists, and critical paths can be drawn up and stored on an Internet server, available for anyone's perusal at any time. To simplify matters for the steering committee, you can put up an abridged version of the document at regular intervals. Highly customizable and easy to use, SamePage has a tremendous potential for customer communications and collaborations.

PictureTalk is another Internet product that's well suited for communication and collaboration with customers. Made by a Pleasanton, California, company of the same name, Picture Talk is a real-time whiteboard (the company prefers to call it a "real-time visual conferencing tool") that makes visual communication by computer possible over any network, whether the link is a phone line, local area network, or ISDN line. In PictureTalk, one user is the presenter, and the other users are the viewers; seated before their workstations, the viewers see exactly the same images that the presenter creates on his of her workstation. PictureTalk runs on many platforms including Macintosh, Windows, NT, and Unix, and doesn't require special hardware or high-speed connections.

PictureTalk can be used to enhance customer relations in many ways, with one of the best being software training. The PictureTalk client is free, which means that once you've distributed it to your customers you can conduct hands-on software training sessions with any number of customers. Customers can view the instructor's workstation as if it were their own; at any point, a customer can become the presenter, allowing the trainer to observe her or his work and offer suggestions. Since the PictureTalk whiteboard can accommodate any digital input, including digital video, it can be used for real-time multimedia presentations. At the moment, however, PictureTalk whiteboard can't convey audio--if you wan to carry on a simultaneous conversation, you have to use a telephone (or speakerphone)--but a future release will send audio over the network, allowing users to speak and listen through their computers.

You can combine PictureTalk with almost any application; for example, you can couple it with SamePage to Conduct project review meetings with offsite customers. Or you can use it to enable your product support personnel to diagnose computer problems remotely, thus turning an ordinary 1-800 service call into a much more efficient problem-solving experience.

Automating Customer Relations

You might be surprised to learn that you can automate much of the selling, service and support, and quality assurance aspects of customer relations. BayStone Software in Saratoga, California, recently introduced an applications suite called Customer Interaction Software that allows you to do just that, and throughout your enterprise. As a result, a salesperson can quickly and remotely review all company information on a specific account and thus give a customer (or prospect) an up-to-the minute status report during a sales call.

Based on a powerful workflow engine, the BayStone suite contains five modules, including SalesCenter, which tracks and manages every step of the sales process from lead generation to the sale itself: SupportCenter, which does the same for customer calls, information requests, and other matters; and QualityCenter, which automates the quality control and assurance process. All of the data is brought together in iMonitor, a decision support system that conveys the status of all customer-related processes to all levels of your organization in graphics real-time format. Finally, the inevitable Web integration is provided by the WebXchange module, which allows you to access and modify customer database information through a Web browser.

No Time Like the Present

Although the technology I've described may seem to be far out on the leading edge, it's being adopted by all sorts of companies. You'd be making a mistake to ignore the potential of groupware and the Internet to improve your relationship with customers . Your competitors may very well have already begun to use the technology; at the very least, they're probably investigating it's use. Not only do your customers want solid value and high quality for their money, they also expect a more personalized relationship. Using groupware and the Internet, it's now possible to give the just all that.