Customer.com

Who Should Read Customers.com?

We wrote this book to bridge the gap between technologists and business people, all of whom have a common goal: to make it easier for their customers to do business with them! So, who might be interested in reading this book?

1. Business executives who want progressive, customer-focused organizations

2. Visionary sales and marketing executives who want to understand how to take advantage of new interactive channels to reach and retain customers

3. Technology planners, architects, and managers, who are committed to delivering value to the business

4. Anyone who wants to understand how to thrive in the information economy

What’s In It for You?

Would you like to know how your organization can benefit the most from E-Business?

Would you like to know how your customers can benefit from your E-Business and electronic commerce initiatives? That’s what this book is about.

Customers.com summarizes the best practices for electronic commerce today on the Internet and beyond—call centers, kiosks, integrated voice response, smart cards, and even smart cars! You’ll walk behind the scenes at over 16 pioneering companies—companies that have committed to doing what it takes to make it easier for their customers to do business with them.

How do today’s cyber-businesses create fanatical customer loyalty? They carefully streamline every aspect of their customer’s interactions with them. They insure that nothing ever falls into a "black hole." They reassure the customer each step of the way. Before the customer has time to wonder whether something’s been taken care of properly, she receives notification that it has. Of course, we don’t all have the opportunity of creating virtual businesses from scratch. Most of us have brick and mortar companies, with people, and sales forces, and distributors, and call centers. Yet, we’re also trying to leverage the Web to make it easier for prospects to find out about our companies and products and easier for customers to transact business with us electronically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In this book, you’ll learn that you can’t do business on the Internet in a vacuum. Instead, Internet Commerce needs to be part of a broader, E-Business strategy—a strategy that embraces all the ways you let your customers interact with you electronically: by touch-tone phone, by fax, by e-mail, by kiosk, by hand-helds, and via the Web. If you don’t coordinate your Web initiatives with the rest of the ways you do business electronically, you’ll probably waste a lot of time and money. You’ll also learn what it takes to link these customer-facing initiatives back through the rest of your operational systems and out to those of your suppliers.

Here’s what else you’ll learn by reading Customers.com:

The Five Steps to Success in Electronic Commerce:

1. Make it easy for customers to do business with you.

2. Focus on the end customer for your products and services.

3. Redesign your customer-facing processes from the end customer’s point of view.

4. Wire your company for profit: Design a comprehensive, evolving electronic commerce architecture.

5. Foster customer loyalty, the key to profitability in electronic commerce.

Each of these steps has its own explanatory chapter. In each, you’ll gain a good overview of how to think about your customers, your business, your information technology initiatives, and even, your accounting systems.

The Eight Critical Success Factors for E-Business:

The rest of the book is organized around a set of critical success factors we gleaned from studying the best practices of over 40 companies. They are:

1. Target the right customers.

2. Own the customer’s total experience.

3. Streamline business processes that impact the customer.

4. Provide a 360° view of the customer relationship.

5. Let customers help themselves.

6. Help customers do their jobs.

7. Deliver personalized service.

8. Foster community.

Again, we’ve devoted a chapter to each of these concepts, filled with examples, so you can go behind the obvious and get to the real core issues involved in implementing each of these critical success factors. To bring these home to you, we illustrate each one with two detailed case studies. This is the real meat of the book. This is where you’ll walk behind the scenes and meet people like John Samuel from American Airlines, Phil Gibson from National Semiconductor, Dudley Nigg from Wells Fargo, Carolyn Miller from the National Science Foundation, and many, many more. These are the heroes and heroines of the book—the people who have done what it takes to make it easy for their customers to do business with them.

Sixteen Detailed Case Studies:

American Airlines, National Semiconductor, Hertz, Amazon.com, Babson College, National Science Foundation, Bell Atlantic, Wells Fargo,

Dell Computer, iPrint, Boeing, PhotoDisc, Dow Jones, General Motors, Cisco Systems, Tripod.

I know you’ll enjoy this book and find it a valuable resource for your own planning process. Although I wrote the book and Ronni Marshak edited it, Customers.com draws on the collective wisdom and contributions of the whole team here at the Patricia Seybold Group. It’s our attempt to convey to you much of what we’ve learned over the last two and a half years about the strategic application of technology to the most pressing business issue today: how to win and retain profitable customers!

ISBN : 0812930371, Author : Seybold, Publisher : MPH - 1998, Dimensions : 23.4 x 15 x 3.6 cm, Paperback : 384 pages