NetDialog Announces Upgrade, Hosting Services and Extranet.

By Rachel Chalmers NetDialog Inc is ready to announce Release 2.0 of its online customer management (OCM) system at the iEC Expo in New York. The software is designed to improve customers' experience of a web site while enabling the owner of the site to continually improve it. "It's a closed-loop process supported by a patent," explains president and CEO Joe Fantuzzi. NetDialog's real strength is that it watches how customers make their way through the content on a site. "We track visitors and give them self-service information that is known to have helped others," Fantuzzi says. Usage data is aggregated in turn and fed back to the webmaster, who can use it to fix problems with the site. The result is a kind of real- time collaborative filtering and customer feedback loop, based on the premise that what customers do is just as important as what they say. Release 2.0 introduces an extensible markup language (XML) document type definition (DTD) for web-centric customer care. The company has submitted this DTD to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and says it will work with various groups to have the DTD accepted as a standard. "The only piece we're not submitting is the how," Fantuzzi explains. He believes there's so much in NetDialog that rivals who try to reverse-engineer the software from the standard won't be able to keep up. NetDialog has also extended the workflow capabilities in Release 2.0, and has added user interface customization features. Pricing starts at $50,000 for the OCM server, 10 concurrent advisor seats, three fixed administration seats and unlimited customer access. Extra advisors cost $1000 per fixed seat or $3000 per concurrent seat. If that's too expensive a proposition for a small or medium business, NetDialog will host the application on its own servers for $4000 per month. Mind you, customers have to sign up for six months and pay an additional start-up fee, so they still won't see a lot of change from $30,000. So convinced is NetDialog of the utility of its OCM that it has built an extranet where its own customers can seek service and support. For 10% of license or hosting fees, OCM users can customize their software, check bills and records of service and note their deployment needs. As nice as that is for customers, Fantuzzi says it's even better for NetDialog. "Each supplier who touches NetDialog is a concurrent seat," he explains. Every trace they leave on the site helps the company improve its service. "Combine that with automation and data mining, and the whole industry of surveying becomes part of customer care," he concludes.