Call For The Cavalry

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday August 15, 2000

Dorothy Kennedy

CRM flourishes where customers fume, writes Dorothy Kennedy.

Recently, I checked out of the Millennium Broadway Hotel (145 West 44th Street, New York, NY) at the end of a whirlwind working trip, inadvertently leaving anexpensive bottle of perfume in my room. After some simple and friendly negotiations between Australia and the US, it was agreed that the stuff would be sent back to me via airmail, at my expense.

Last night, I arrived home to find a FedEx card in my mailbox. The charge for getting my $100 bottle of smelly stuff back home hadsuddenly blown out to about $US76 (I can't bear to convert it to Australian dollars).

I called the hotel to find out why the item had not been sent by post, as I had requested. After about 20 minutes on the phone withnumerous hotel staff, some bright spark told me it was the hotel's policy to use FedEx or UPS when guests asked for forgotten things to be sent home, that's why.

It was no use saying that no-one at the hotel had ever told me this, and that, anyway, it was my money and I'd asked for the thing to be sent by post. The transaction was over, end of story. I gave up, hung up, and added the episode to a bulging inner portfolio of luminous New York customer experiences.

On the Web, as in New York, no-one hears you scream whenshopping, browsing or paying bills turns into a less-than-stellarexperience. Online customers simply log off when frustration sets in, vanishing into cyberspace, taking their wallets with them.

That is why e-businesses, and traditional businesses with Web presences, are giving Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems carefulconsideration. (These suites are about as sexy as the proverbial ugh boot, and, like the uggie, not suitable for all occasions, but are often worn regardless. They have also suffered the misfortune of landing on the wrong side of the IT industry's linguistic divide, and are now known variously as eCRM, E-CRM and e-CRM solutions.)

Exponents of the art of eCRM apply themselves to the hard graft of transforming customer visits to corporate Web sites into useful marketing information. Part of this task requires the deployment of a mechanism that will get customer emails answered, with someaccuracy, within as short a time as possible, at as low a cost and using as few staff hours as possible.

``We reckon you can probably answer about 80 emails a day per person, so if you've got a growth of more than that over a month you're quickly adding body count," estimates Gary Munden of Kana Communications, a US-basedsoftware vendor which rolled out its first application an email and Web site customer service management tool as recently as 1998.

The crowded eCRM market's most visible occupants are Siebel Systems, Clarify and Oracle, but smaller players such as eGain and Kana are also carving out handy territory. This competition is good news for e-businesses because,although the systems aren't cheap, there are plenty to choose from. But remember, if the gear doesn't let you hear the customers scream, it probably isn't doing its job.

dorothy-kennedy@hotmail.com