Do Business Well

Back to the car of the future—the one with the Internet connection and onboard GPS system. Car manufacturers will no longer be just in the business of making and selling cars. In fact, that could end up being the smallest part of their business. If it were up to GM, they’d establish a relationship with you to service all your car transportation needs. They would pick up your car once a week and have it cleaned. They would offer you a car if you needed to travel to a different city and, of course, they would have someone pick up and deliver your car curbside at the airport. They would finance your car and, naturally, service it. They would even offer you the seasonal car program providing a convertible during the summer and an allwheel-drive in winter. They would engage you in a dialogue that would make owning and using your car easier and more convenient. In the future when you buy a car you will also be able to sign up for a reward program that gives you points when you make your lease payment on time, when you get your car serviced by an authorized provider, or when you make a purchase from any company participating in the program. As you leave the ski area on Sunday evening, your on-board computer pings, offering you a certificate for 100 points the next time you buy lift tickets at a participating ski resort. With the touch of a button, you forward the offer to your email box where you can retrieve it the next morning. On the drive home, your GPS map screen occasionally lights up and tells you in a soft voice about things you may be interested in along the road. If you want to bookmark anything, you just push a button on the dashboard and forward the information to your email address. As your fuel level gets low, your car tells you when the next gas station is coming up. But not just any gas station—the computer knows to notify you about gas stations that are participating in your rewards program. (If there is no participating gas station in the area and you’re about to run out of gas, the service you’ve signed up for will, hopefully, direct you to the closest available gas station.)

Although these services are still in the future, shorter-term technology developments and new levels of systems integration can enhance customer dialogue in a number of exciting ways.

EMAIL

The greatest short-term impact is happening as a result of HTML email—the ability to send and display web pages in an email program. Close to half of all Internet users can now receive HTML email and this number is growing every day. With active web pages delivered by email, it is fast becoming possible to interact with customers directly from within the message. Questions and forms allow recipients to submit answers and additional information immediately. And all of it can be linked to the recipients’ personal profiles. This may allow email marketers to ask fewer questions when someone first signs up, and instead engage incrementally over time.

The ability to make purchases directly from within an email is improving rapidly as well. Some retailers have already implemented solutions where a click-to-buy link in the email encodes the product code and customer ID. Clicking on the link takes you to the retailer’s website, identifies you, pulls up your purchase information (assuming you’re a returning customer), and puts the product into your shopping cart. After entering a password and making a few more clicks, your order is in the mail. This level of integration between promotional emails and Web retailers is rapidly becoming the norm. In short, the interactivity provided on the website is going to become indistinguishable from the interactivity available from within email messages.

DATA TECHNOLOGIES

Databases are getting larger and larger, making it possible to store information with greater detail and create more complex data models. The technologies used to collect, consolidate, and analyze the data are improving rapidly, and so are the predictive models and technologies that can use the data to detect patterns and anticipate future behavior. The engaged organization is getting access to the data-driven tools that allow it to become smart about how it listens to and understands its customers.

WEB PERSONALIZATION

When you show up on a website, the engaged organization will immediately identify and recognize you. The pages you see on the site will be customized to present special offers and information targeted specifically to you. If you’ve chosen not to receive email, the same messages can still be linked in to the website, giving you the option to view them there instead.

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