Customers.com.

TITLE: Customers.com

ISBN: 0-8129-3037-1

PUBLISHER: Times Business, Random House

PUBLICATION DATE: 1998

LENGTH: 344 pages

PRICE: $28 AIIM members, $33 non-members

SOURCE: AIIM International, [phone], www.aiim.org 

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is a buzzword that emerged in the late '90s and is now widely used. What exactly e-commerce means to the business professional varies depending on the industry, product, or service involved. The term's connotations differ depending on whether you are a buyer or a seller.

One thing is certain though: most companies are rushing to adopt e-commerce, sometimes with inadequate forethought and planning. Worst of all, companies may be focusing their sights in the wrong direction by looking solely at internal processes and the potential for cost savings. The real emphasis should be first on redesigning customer-facing business processes from the end customer's point of view.

Patricia Seybold's Customers.com offers useful insight into the potential of e-commerce. It clarifies what e-commerce can mean to a company's productivity and its competitive position in the marketplace. Seybold, a longtime advisor to Fortune 500 giants and smaller companies in the area of e-commerce, is uniquely qualified to present the material from the perspective of a practitioner. Actual cases detail experience in various industries and illustrate both successes and failures in e-commerce implementation.

The book provides effective strategies that consider electronic commerce from a variety of perspectives: technical requirements, the management of sales and customer support systems, and the processes needed to be successful. The end result is a recipe to create an infrastructure that seamlessly blends a company's e-commerce initiatives with its overall business. Seybold notes that the implementation of an effective e-commerce strategy:

* increases customer loyalty

* decreases time-to-market for new products

* increases profitability

* reduces costs per transaction substantially

* reduces customer service time appreciably 

* provides an avenue to become a player in today's fast-paced "global economy"

Customers.com walks the reader through the steps necessary to focus e-commerce projects on the end customer in an effort to make it easy to do business with a company. This seems like a simple concept; however, the first step is to determine exactly who is the all-important end customer. Seybold begins by highlighting critical success factors and explains how to develop a solution to each.

Customers.com contains applicable case studies that bring e-commerce from the theoretical to the practical. With each case study, Seybold summarizes the case's critical success factors. For the more technical reader, there is a section describing the technological infrastructure implemented by the companies involved. Since no single business solution is perfect for all organizations, there is also a section offering Seybold's "prescription for action." This section assesses the actions taken by the subject companies, offers advice to cure shortfalls, and suggests the next steps.

At the end of every chapter is an action-oriented outline titled "takeaways and lessons learned." This feature answers the question "Okay, but what should I do now?"

This is a fine book, yet it could have been even more useful. The case studies, for example, were interesting, but Seybold could have included more of them, covering a wider variety of types of companies (most of those highlighted are very large). The concepts explained so well in the book apply to smaller companies as well, and examples of them would be useful.

Additionally, the how-to of setting up an implementation team could have been covered more thoroughly. For example, who should be involved, how do you get buy-in to the project, and how do you organize the effort? Hopefully these improvements will appear in future editions. All that aside, this book is a valuable resource, whether the reader is a novice or is already involved in implementation of e-commerce solutions.

Robert Shultz is vice president of corporate credit and customer finance at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City, California. He may be contacted at [e-mail].