E-Business: A Look At the Future.

At the recent CE Symposium, "Creating Order from E-Commerce Chaos," (page 50), three CIOs shared their experiences with bringing their companies up to 21st century speed.

Tandy CIO Evelyn Follit On Empowering Employees to Boost Customer Service

Part of our journey to become the best company to work for in America was to create a culture that would enable our people to contribute as much as they could so they can reach inside and give us their discretionary value. The people are a very core competency. These are a few strategies we implemented to improve the customer and employee experiences.

On-line answer support. I went through the exit interviews with our poor people in the stores and, basically, they said they did not like feeling stupid. The technology today is moving too quickly to keep up with it all. So we've brought our answers on-line and we call it AnswerNet. Our associates can now ask a question and provide consistent and correct answers to the customers. And turnover in the store, since we installed this, has gone down very dramatically. We also have streamlined operation support, which deals with things like using PeopleSoft Online. And we did something else our associates really love. In order to make more money, they need to be certified in additional products and services, so we created an application for them to get certified online instead of having to wait three to four weeks for paperwork. And these are minimum wage guys who are dying to get on commission, so this was a big hit with them.

On-line services integration. I spend a lot of time with our people in the stores and I love it--because it helps me to see is that if I ever design anything crazy, I deserve all the terrible repercussions that typically the CIO gets. For example, I discovered that in order to activate Sprint long-distance services in the store, the customer actually had to leave the cash lane, walk over to another area, pick up a phone, get information, fill out a form, then give that information to yet another person on a phone--it was a nightmare. Now we're bringing this right to the cash lane; they just key in the information and it goes right to Sprint. And that means our royalty stream comes in even sooner. Integrated customer contact strategy. When I got there, Tandy had years of information on each customer, but they weren't doing an awful lot with it. My master's degree happens to be focused on database, data warehousing, mining, marting, so I salivated over this opportunity. We now are able to marry information we g ather from the Web with information gathered from the customer experience in the store and it really offers us a rich opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. It was really a latent value that the company had not been able to unleash.

Lessons Learned on the E-Commerce Front: SBC Services CID Ed Glotzbach

1. Web enabling is not a cure-all. If you put a Web front end on a problematic process, you get a really cool Web-enabled problematic business process--and your customers know it. You hear a lot of business leaders say, "We need to be faster and get this on the Web." That may not be the solution. The business process may need to be solved before you put it on the Web.

2. When you launch a project without integration to the existing systems, staffing levels have to be there to handle the manual work load that may result. One of the things about Web enablement is it allows these electronic transactions to come in at great volume, and they just fall on the floor if they're not woven into their existing systems today. So you've got to be ready because that's where customer service really takes it on the chin.

3. If time to market is important, better to evolve the e-business project to it's ultimate state rather than wait for the perfect launch. Now that's tough for us in the telephone business because you don't cut over central offices when they're about ready to go. You wait until they're deadly accurate and then you cut 'em. So for us, we try to, when we're 75 percent of the way there, launch it, see how it works, and evolve it along the way. That's the way a lot of the younger generation, coming out of college, are taught to do these things because that's the way they study. But that's not the way we studied.

4. There is rarely an end-to-end project. The project just continues to evolve based on customer feedback and you just change it. We are able to do applications within two or three days even in a business our size. So you really do evolve them on a daily basis and you need to get used to that. The marketing folks also need to get used to that as do the service delivery folks. Once you start, you're just on this continuous merry-go-round that you need to enjoy rather than fight, because that's how customer service evolves.

Duke Energy CIO Cecil Smith on the Real Implications of Business on the Net

The business implications. Clearly, there are revenue opportunities. Dell and Wal-Mart are classic examples of using expense reductions through extending the enterprise and managing the supply chain and product delivery. Cisco is a great example of managing information content and delivery.

For example, Cisco has 32 plants worldwide, but only two of them are owned by Cisco. And in 1999, IBM saved $110 million on $3 billion purchased externally from 10,000 suppliers. It's a 3.7 percent savings. That's why automation of the supply chain through e-procurement is a low hanging fruit, to realize the savings that can help to pay for e-commerce investments. And in the customer support and service world, during 1999, 58 percent of IBM's total support came across the Internet. That's 35 million transactions. The technology implications. In terms of data management, when you look at the numbers of tools and the amount of data, it's going to be staggering. And what do I do with it? Do I data-mine it? Do I data warehouse it? How can I do other things with it to get my next revenue bump or next revenue sale?

Transaction processing is huge. You've got to make sure you've got your front-office applications, which are your customer-enabled, your customer effacing transactions vs. your high-volume transaction processing back-office applications. Your enterprise resource planning platforms are crucial, Whatever vendors you're using, they have to be automated because they become major building blocks for you going forward.

And don't forget e-availability. You've got to have a highly available, reliable network and capability so that when someone visits the site, they have a good experience. There's a Web site I love to use. Four days out of five it's fine, but on average, one day out of five, I can't get to it. But I'm just getting information, so it's aggravating, but it's not a big deal. But if I were that company offering transaction processing, whether for revenue creation or to deliver a product, then I've lost as far as the new e-business world.