New products from Clarify Inc., Vantive Corp., and others are designed to pull together all possible touch points with a customer, whether they're via the Web, E-mail, fax, call centers, or in person. "Our strategy is to let customers click, walk, and talk," says Melissa Hansen, director of relationship marketing at Carlson Leisure Group, a Minneapolis travel-services company that uses Vantive's sales and support Web applications. "It should be irrelevant how they're contacting us." The goal is to let companies track their customers better-and build tighter, more lucrative, longer-lasting relationships.

To that end, Vantive this week will unveil Vantive Web Enterprise, a set of applications for Web-based field service, sales, and E-commerce that delivers online interactions to the same database as call-center, fax, E-mail, and other points of contact. Clarify last week unveiled Clarify eFrontOffice, which offers similar integrated functions. And Remedy Corp. just disclosed a partnership with eGain Communications Corp. that will integrate Remedy's help-desk product and eGain's E-mail Management System.

Pilot Network Services, an Alameda, Calif., Internet service provider, is testing Octane 99, available this week from Octane Software Inc. The product is aimed at fast-growing Internet companies and links Web, call-center, E-mail, fax, and in-person interactions. "However you want to communicate with a customer, you should be able to do it through one product," says Lyle York, Pilot's VP of customer service.

Why? To give companies a more complete picture of customer activity while focusing on how important a particular customer is, rather than the medium the customer uses to communicate. For instance, telephone calls are typically answered hours, or even days, before E-mail queries-regardless of whether the latter are coming from higher-priority customers. With the new software, that will no longer be the case.

"It lets you prioritize by who the customer is," says Howard Koenig, corporate VP of operations and client services at Automated Data Processing Inc., a Roseland, N.J., payroll-processing company. This helps ensure that a company's biggest and most important customers are getting the attention they need.

Internet customer-relationship management is so critical to ADP that the company is an early adopter of Clarify's eFrontOffice apps. ADP will implement the entire package, starting with E-mail Response Management, which handles E-mail response and routing, as well as a common-queuing product that pulls calls, faxes, E-mails, and Web interactions into one database, then sends them to the most appropriate available representative. "It's extending the functionality of the call center to E-mail and Web interactions," says Koenig. "It [eliminates] dedicated support units for each type of interaction."

ADP will also use an eFrontOffice personalization component to deliver a customized portal based on customers' previous transactions, both on and off the Web. That will help ADP provide a higher level of customer service-for instance, tracking the status of support visits or product delivery-for which customers are willing to pay a premium, says Koenig.

The software also lets ADP see all interactions with a given customer. Although ADP customers have used E-mail and the Web to contact the company in the past, they haven't been able to use those technologies to initiate sales or access service records. And call-center reps haven't been able to see records of a customer's efforts to contact the company over the Internet. With those capabilities in place, ADP can develop an individual relationship history with each of its customers.

The need for these products is very real: As business moves to the Web, customer service hasn't kept pace. An InformationWeek survey of more than 100 large service organizations found that while 86% say they have a strong commitment to improving customer-relationship management, only 54% have developed a common view of their customers across business functions and channels. "Without that, it's real difficult to provide knock-your-socks-off customer service," says Linda Pagliaro, a consultant at Innovative Systems Inc., a customer-relationship management vendor that sponsored the survey.

Opportunity Knocks
The two biggest drivers behind the push to improve customer-relationship management, according to the survey, are cross-selling opportunities (74%) and the desire to provide campaign and profitability information to customer-service reps (62%). The latter will enable E-commerce applications to offer better customers better deals.

But a Jupiter Communications LLC survey of 125 top Web sites conducted last August found that only 60% of companies responded within four days to customer E-mail. By January, that number had dropped to 49%, as sites struggled to service more users. In part, says Jupiter analyst Ken Allard, that's because Web and E-mail customer service hasn't been integrated into most companies' customer-relationship management efforts.

Mortgage.com, a Plantation, Fla., online mortgage broker, knows that firsthand. The company implemented Web and E-mail response software from Brightware Inc. to help manage its E-mail. According to Jack Rodgers, president of Mortgage.com's consumer direct group, Brightware's Answer Agent responds in seconds to 80% to 90% of simple inquiries, such as daily mortgage rates. That lets Mortgage.com replace what Rodgers calls "$7-an-hour call-center drones" with consultants who are better able to walk customers through more difficult decisions.

But the software doesn't help those consultants handle the E-mail and phone calls they do receive, and there's no system to prioritize the messages. "It's very confusing to operate a call center exposed to the Internet," he says. "You can't block E-mails when you're taking a call, or phone calls when you're responding to an E-mail."

What's necessary are Internet call-center applications that can recognize any kind of technology, then prioritize customers according to their importance, Rodgers says. Although Mortgage.com is evaluating some of the Internet customer-relationship management products on the market, the company plans to build its own as it waits for the technology to mature.

Still, some companies are finding the new Internet customer-relationship management products to be capable enough. Genicom Corp., a Chantilly, Va., hardware and services vendor, is adopting Vantive's field service and support Web applications for ESSC, its services company. ESSC customers can enter details about a problem into the system, and the Vantive app automatically assigns a field engineer to fix it. The customer can then monitor the case for an estimated time of completion and other information-without making a single phone call.

Of course, some customers still prefer using the telephone and other methods of contact, which is why Genicom needs a system that can handle everything. With the Vantive product, customer records such as service requests, trouble tickets, and purchase information "all come to the same place," says Genicom CIO Bill Carney, "and once it's in there, it looks the same, too."

Carlson is using Vantive to link its 6,000 associates' customer interactions with a central repository. "In most cases, the hardware in an office isn't owned by us or the franchisee. We have no way of standardizing what's out there," says Becky Freeman, Carlson's manager of IT. Vantive's browser makes it easy for agents to access centralized customer information.

The sales package will also add power and interactivity to Carlson's Web presence. The company wants to open the application to customers so they can update their travel profiles online, and to walk them through the process of setting up flights or warn them of problems with their itineraries, all processes that can take much longer on the phone. But the Web technology has to fit into Carlson's walk-in and call-center models, which remain its core business.

If, for instance, a Carlson customer is having trouble booking a ticket online, he or she can call an agent, and the agent will have the transaction information immediately available. The idea is to give customers the freedom to access information any way they want, while keeping the company aware of their travel activities.

In the second quarter, Clarify's eFrontOffice will add improved E-commerce features that will let businesses open their database to external partners and link to the Internet payment systems used by large E-commerce sites. ADP's Koenig says his company could use such capabilities to pass customer records from its systems to the tax-processing centers it works with. "It allows it to happen faster, with fewer points of interaction, and the customer has more assurance that it's being done," he says.

Meanwhile, Pilot's York likes that Octane 99 lets his company set up new processes to sell and service an important customer. "Because we're focusing on E-commerce, our business is changing daily," he says. And while the dream for Internet entrepreneurs is to conduct all business online, Pilot still needs to communicate with customers in traditional ways. Octane 99 links those communications together. By capturing phone calls or tracking how customers spend their time on Pilot's Web site, for instance, Octane can help the company better target its marketing efforts.

Still other companies are integrating standalone packages. 1-800-Batteries, which carries more than 8,000 accessories for notebook computers and mobile phones, wanted to give fast feedback to its often-harried customers. It deployed an instant-messaging system from startup FaceTime Communications and integrated it with a customer-management system from Onyx Software Corp. "The great part is that no matter how a customer contacts us-by phone, fax, or Web-our agents have everything right there: service log, sales histories. Even chat conversations get posted as incidents," says CEO Ken Hawk.

Tying customer interactions together is at the core of the philosophy of customer-relationship management: Track every customer interaction like a hawk. With these new tools, customer interactions over the Web become an asset, not a liability.

With additional reporting by Richard Karpinski, InternetWeek