The first trend to note is the increasing emphasis on the commoditization of products. While this has been discussed at length in corporations worldwide, companies are aggressively struggling for supremacy in the battle to provide customers the most personalized, value-added products and services at competitive prices—all at readily accessible locations.

In the April/May issue of Fast Company Magazine, Seth Godin of Yoyodyne addressed the key requirement of this trend as he outlined the rules for developing a strategic learning relationship with customers—a practice he terms Permission Marketing. In a highly competitive environment, companies must practice "permission" rather than "interruption" marketing. In Mr. Godin's words, "Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers," he says. "It's not just about entertainment—it's about education." This is truly the nature of the new business beast.

The second trend is a cautious, but accelerating migration toward meeting customers not in person, not by phone or by mail, but at the corporate website. As security issues wane, the Internet is perceived at the corporate and individual consumer levels not only as an efficient way to market and sell products, but to communicate with existing and potential customers. Companies like the billboard "attractiveness" of the website where they can quickly disseminate their corporate image, mission, and product and service information to millions of potential customers, partners, and competitors. Fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you look at it, everyone knows what everyone else is doing —  it is the ideology of the new business environment!

So this begs an obvious question. If everyone knows what you are doing, sees your mission, products, services, etc. how do you succeed?

Included in almost every website is the standard e-mail address—"Questions? Comments? E-Mail us at sales@company.com, web-based forms or other points of personal interaction.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of companies—an estimated ninety-nine per cent of those doing business on the Internet—take a pro forma attitude to e-mail solicitation, not realizing its potential as the perfect tool for developing lasting, high quality, learning, personal customer relationships.

According to the Electronic Messaging Association, by the year 2000 there will be approximately 12 billion e-mail messages sent per day. Couple this with Frost & Sullivan's estimation that less then 1% of current and potential e-mail collaboration users have implemented an e-mail management solution. Translation, less than 1% of companies are taking steps to implement high quality customer service via e-mail—growing to over 12 billion message per day! The Internet, and e-mail specifically, is clearly the cornerstone for long-term, high-value customer relationships.

Why? Because E-Mail:

• Is easy to use. E-mail is a colloquial, relaxed, and friendly medium for communicating with a company. E-mail differs from placing a telephone call, where the customer is placed at an immediate disadvantage by being put on hold, or asked to press multiple numbers before being directed to the right customer rep—or trapped into listening to a sales pitch while on hold. With e-mail, the customer simply types a message addressing their unique issue, and sends it to the company. No hold time, no unwanted advertising, just a question seeking an answer.
• Allows for any time (24-hour 7-days-a-week) anywhere (road, office, home) contact with a company.
• Is inexpensive—and available at the user's convenience.
• Offers your company the opportunity to append customized, corporate-approved communication written by content-specialists to each e-mail response—anticipating the needs of your customers.
• Is the best way to get to know your customers. E-mail users in general are more educated, affluent, savvy. What you learn about them can be funneled into databases where customers can be segmented by interest and demographics for specialized target marketing campaigns.

Many companies are in a state of denial about their e-mail management. Yet sophisticated e-mail management is about nothing less than utilizing a prime customer service channel to its fullest.

To determine at what level your company's e-mail management operates, take a moment to answer these questions:

• How many messages do you receive a day? week? month?
• Do you assign tracking numbers to every message received at your company website?
• Can you track down a message in less than five minutes?
• Do you acknowledge every message sent to your company website when it first comes in?
• Do you have multiple people responding to messages that are sent to a single address?
• What is the average response time to each message? Is it measured in days, hours or minutes?
• Can you verify all e-mail messages are answered before you go home at the end of a day, week or month?
• Can you compare message traffic from day to day, week to week, month to month?
• Can you add consistent company statements to the bottom of every e-mail response?
• Can you grade your employee's response time and benchmark against company-wide averages?
• Did your most important customer send you an e-mail within the last 30 days? Did you respond? If yes, how quickly? If no, why not?

If you can't satisfactorily answer the above questions, you are missing the primary customer service opportunity available via the Internet.

Imagine this: You are a large sportswear company. A customer sends you an e-mail asking for instructions for how to remove a stain from a jacket. This customer writes that he/she loves your products, recommends your line to all of his/her friends, but needs to know about this stain because the washing instructions have been misplaced.

You fail to acknowledge this e-mail, so your customer has no idea whether you received it. Because you don't have a tracking system, or a message routing system to employees based on skill sets, his e-mail sits in a bin, lost somewhere in your computer network.

After seven months or so, one of your employees finds the e-mail and sends back this response: "Thank you for writing to XYZ Company. We appreciate your comments." That's it! No reference to his question! How do you think this customer feels about your company now?

I can answer that, because this happened to me. I felt the company didn't care about my problem or about me. Even though I continue to appreciate the high quality of their products, I am not so enthusiastic about the company itself. Worse, I find that I am talking to my friends nowadays not about their products but how I was treated.

Let's assume this same company understands the power of personal marketing through e-mail.

First, they would promptly acknowledge my message and assign me a tracking number. Not only does this make me feel important, but the tracking number installs me in the company's database as a satisfied customer. In other words, this company, making the reasonable assumption that I have "granted permission" for future correspondence with them, can now call up my name and e-mail address whenever they are announcing new products or special offers that pertain to questions, comments, suggestions, anything I have corresponded with them regarding.

Next, they would route my message to the employee or group of employees best suited to answer my question. I would receive a response within the same business day. Along with a specific answer to my question, the company would take the opportunity to communicate a message, perhaps telling me about a special discount available on a product similar to the one I bought, or about a new line just introduced.

Every time I correspond with this company, they gather more information about me in their database, cataloging my interests and preferences. They begin to anticipate my needs before I do. And I accept it all happily because, without realizing it, I am now part of a relationship between myself and this company. And I am recommending their gear to friends right and left!

To get the most out of your e-mail management, look for a solution that provides the following features:

Intelligent routing of e-mail messages. Based on complete message text and integration with existing customer databases, the solution should be able to route the message to sales, accounting, the CEO, marketing, technical support, and weed out unsolicited bulk e-mail to avoid overload on the system.

Automatic acknowledgment of all incoming responses. The solution should enable you to create and send a response to every message, from as simple as, "We received it," to as complex as answering the question fully. The solution should be able to automate the most repetitive responses, with a standard response library built in—leveraging, not replacing, the corporate knowledgebase.

A unique tracking number assigned to each message. Thus, all correspondence pertaining to that issue can be threaded between the customer service rep handling the inquiry and the customer. Not only does this foster a personal relationship with the company, but it provides an audit trail in the event of a discrepancy in service, pricing, etc.

Real-time feedback on the system's activity. Enables a manager to track in real time each customer service rep's number of messages waiting and average response time, and current activity status.

Detailed reporting functions. Enables supervisors to receive detailed reports on message, agent, system, and customer activity on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Automated response templates. Developed by a subject-matter expert rather than an individual customer service rep, ensuring that the correct message is conveyed each and every time a customer corresponds with your company.

Easy remote access. Customer service reps and supervisors should be able to handle e-mail from any location—home, office, vacation site—using existing e-mail infrastructure, or e-mail clients via local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). E-mail management should not requiring secure dial-up to the corporate network for remote management.

Validation of customers. On a queue-by-queue basis, validate customers so that those who are paying for a service, or are high value customers are routed into a preferred queue while the general public is routed into a different queue.

Integration. A solution that works with the existing customer management technology, including the existing customer database(s), call tracking solutions, computer telephony integration solutions, e-mail and other network infrastructures already in place.

Scaleability. A scaleable solution that can grow with increasing e-mail volume that will result from your improved level of customer service.