InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 27, 1999
IT Adds The Personal Touch
By Michael S. Katz
The Internet and customer service call centers offer an opportunity to leverage customer-initiated contacts: those golden moments when the customer reaches out to the enterprise for help, or, even better, to buy something.
The first trick is to find a quick way to identify the caller or Web visitor. Early standouts in this arena were the travel giants, with passcodes that customers used to trigger immediate recognition and bypass all sorts of time-consuming questions. The Internet incarnation of this tactic is the ubiquitous cookie or user ID.
Trick two is to have enough information about prior interactions to give customers what they want quickly. Consider this cyber-pharmacy E-mail: "You will run out of allergy pills next Thursday. Click here to renew, and we'll deliver more ASAP." No need to type the prescription number, address, or credit-card number. They're all on file. With this type of attentive service, customers won't want to go anywhere else.
Some cautions need to be observed. The point-and-click generation seems less apprehensive about privacy issues than expected, largely because most enterprises have limited their use of such information to things that directly benefit the customer. Suggesting interesting products and providing ready access to order status is well-received.
Amazon.com's trademark "people who bought this book also bought" tactic is usually met with an amused grin and often an order. But concerns may arise about the latest extension of Amazon's tactic, called "Purchase Circles," in which surfers can browse top-selling titles in specific geographies and companies. Employers shift awkwardly in their seats as their employees' top book purchases are displayed in graphic-rich Web pages, breathing sighs of relief as most turn out to be genuinely uninteresting. But picture the itinerant anarchist in accounting ordering copies of some overtly subversive tome for all the members of his weekend militia. Imagine a highly competitive arena where one suddenly finds widespread purchasing of books on a specific segment broadcast for all to see. In response, Amazon offers companies the option of keeping their data private. It won't take too many near misses on the privacy issue to create a backlash against these services that depend so heavily on databases of personal information.
Despite some glitches, today's customer-facing IT systems are putting the personal touch back into big business. People asked to work in high-volume customer-service jobs without personal computing support look more like the automatons of old. The tools are there. The network is there. The cultural tides are flowing in the right direction. Now is the time to get serious about personalized computing.
Michael S. Katz is a senior VP at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, a business-management consulting firm. He can be reached at katz_mike@bah.com.
hile big business has reduced the mom-and-pop shop to a rarely seen anachronism, it has never fully embraced the customer as well as smaller, more intimate enterprises. Ironically, computers are putting the personal touch back into business as legions of the PC-literate are romanced by friendly Web sites that know their names without having to ask.
After delighting your customers, you've got them in the right mood to sell them something else. But what to pitch? Lots of ground has been broken here, with intelligent cross-selling algorithms that propose products based on customer attributes and past purchases. Take customers who have been thinking good thoughts about you and offer them something that shows you're thinking about their needs, and you might have a sale.
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