Executive Summary

As a senior executive in your business you will know that new technologies present both challenges and opportunities for your business in the way you can engage with your customers and leverage competitive advantage. You are also aware of the many traps and pitfalls that, at best, drive up cost and, at worst, damage reputation, unless handled well. This article briefly explains how recent advancements in technology can enhance your company's interaction with your markets, delivering greater value and increasing customer loyalty.

Broadband

We are all aware how new digital technologies have been driving markets forward and enabling new products, services and business models. One of the biggest advances is the near pervasiveness of broadband; this is part of an increasing trend towards our access to the internet being a "given" within the next 3 years. Using the web has become the medium, for delivering value to our clients; it therefore requires careful strategic planning and integration with overall company strategy. What's more, it's not alone - there have been several key technology drivers over the last 3 to 4 years which for various reasons have not yet been embraced by business, but which we believe will inevitably come to play an important role in your company's strategy and marketing efforts. So what do these technologies enable us to do and why do we care about them?

Technologies

There are key technologies that can empower you as a business owner to deliver better value and service to your customers; Web Technologies such as .Net and XML allow a full business application to be securely delivered over the internet via a web browser. We are only a few years away from, for example, MS Word being delivered over a web page allowing you to only pay for what you use.

XML is like very heavyweight glue holding various systems and applications together, allowing information to seamlessly move between these systems and business processes. The result is real-time information access, e.g. live information via tickers. But how do these technologies enable us to deliver better value to our customers?

Customer value from systems today

One of the key benefits of mapping your customer "touch points" is that it allows you to work out and control all your customer interactions. Let's face it, one of the most important things in business is delivering what the customer wants, and there are touch points for an organisation in all areas of their business, not just in the "customer focus" parts like Sales or Customer Support. So the first thing to consider in the evolution of technology, is how best to use it to support your customers right through the business.

The earliest generation of website technology enabled potential customers to access company and product information on their computer screens, essentially an online brochure which became almost an alternative to the phonebook. Succeeding generations of web technology allowed users to access dynamic information such as stock availability and purchase tracking as well as providing the facility to make credit card purchases through secure channels.

Today, due to the progression of web based technologies and the increase in bandwidth (speed) that customers can expect online, companies can offer excellent after-sales service and management facilities via extensive CRM (customer relationship management) databases.

 ...the first thing to consider in the evolution of technology, 
 is how best to use it to support your customers right through the business. 

To achieve your goal of allowing customers to interact fully with your organisation you can now feed your touch points with real time information, driven by interconnectivity between existing business systems such as order processing, helpdesk and the interactive website.

And the future?

If we look forward, we see businesses working effectively through what is termed "Enterprise Portals". These are intelligent information management systems, fully integrated with your business systems and accessed through any browser via the internet. Portals will not only become the business gateway for customers and suppliers, but also you and your employees will have the ability to manage and run your business processes through the same versatile interface, securely and even remotely.

This level of integration ensures that each 'touch point' accesses the same data, meaning that customers, suppliers and management get real-time information from their business and a new level of interaction. But most of all, it ensures a positive and consistent customer experience.

Conclusions

Whether you're a technophobe or a technophile, in practice, the best way to fully deliver to customer expectations is to run your company on technology. In the corporate environment, IT implementations like SAP have enjoyed considerable success for many years on this premise. For middle-market companies however, this kind of installation can be an expensive and time consuming commitment, But with the emergence of these new technologies, medium sized companies now have a real opportunity to seize corporate-type benefits - advances in technology, a proper understanding of client expectations and a thorough understanding of business processes mean it is now possible to deliver a system that can underpin your business and provide it with increased growth and profit over at least the next 2 - 3 year period.

 Whether you're a technophobe or a technophile... 
 the best way to fully deliver to customer expectations is to run your company 
 on technology. 

You may be asking yourself:

• Have we appropriately invested in broadband connectivity both internally and with customers and suppliers?
• Have we understood how best to use XML and .Net technologies to enhance our business and build our competitive advantage?
• Have we got a clear strategy to generate and utilise "real time" information and integrate it with our operational systems and business processes?

If you invest in proper systems to deliver to clients' needs, you will greatly increase the impact of your offerings. IT has now reached the point where you can take the applications that run your business, and use them to deliver a great customer experience!