Customer seruice keU to success

By Rob Vomund E-Business Marketing Manager CCITnreo www.triad.com

F?lL-commerce is still in its infancy. In the three years since it was introduced to our industry we have seen a rush of new companies come into the market set on "revolutionizing" the way we all do business. Backed by millions in venture capital funding, their plans were grand. According to their vision statements, e-commerce was going to make everyone rich! However, as we all know, most of these companies are now gone.

Why did they fail? For starters, they didn't know the industry, and they tried to do too much too fast. They didn't understand the challenges within our industry, including our lack of product identification standards and varying in-store system technologies. They wanted data to flow "seamlessly" from one end of the chain to the other. While this is still a desirable goal, it was not a practical "12-to-24 month business plan" on which to base a new company.

So, where are we today? For the most part, we are left with the same industry players who led the industry before the dot-com boom! On the technology provider side, CCI-

TnIno is still here, and on the supplier side the independents, the co-ops, and the big box retailers are still here, too.

It turns out that the traditional industry players learned from the successes and failures of the newcomers we saw during the dot-com boom, and all of us are now adopting solutions that work. E-commerce today-older and wiser-is alive and well within our industry.

The term "e-commerce" has, however, been replaced in our industry by the term "e-business." The former term generally defined "selling merchandise electronically," while the latter today means a broader term that includes providing both sales and non-sales customer services using the Internet.

The industry has now learned that the key role of the Internet within our marketplace is not in attracting and doing business with unknown customers from far away places. Instead, we have learned that the Internet is best used to service existing customers. In this role, e-business is not so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary. Dealers are now taking what they do best and are doing it in even better ways using the Web.

A recent study by Jupiter Media Metrix reveals some interesting points. Their study shows that traditional retailers have focused on sales and profits to calculate Web site Return On Investment, instead of examining broader benefits that a Web site can add. "Brick and mortar" sales can be influenced by the Web site, as can improved payroll productivity. The Jupiter study concludes that a traditional retailer with a successful website should find that up to two-thirds of the benefits from their online efforts will result from services other than directly selling products online to customers.

Jupiter advises traditional retailers to act quickly to integrate their online and offline systems so they can offer features such as offline store inventory on their Web sites, as well as non-sales customer services.

When Federal Express introduced online package tracking they greatly increased customer satisfaction, while at the same time saving millions of dollars by reducing their own staff needed to answer phones. Service oriented solutions similar to this FedEx example are gaining traction in

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