NEW YORK-If Silicon Valley’s view is correct, all distribution of products and services will migrate to the Internet and companies will therefore close their call centers and stores. But this concept is far from accurate, others argue.
“The idea of disintermediating channels and going on the Web is blatantly self-serving and totally untrue,” said R. David Schmaier, vice president of products for Siebel Systems Inc., San Mateo, Calif.
“The recent correction around Internet stocks shows the Internet doesn’t replace all, but it augments all and will cause companies to radically re-engineer.”
Schmaier gave a keynote address on “Demand Chain Management: eBusiness Channel Dynamics” at the DCI Customer Relationship Management conference Aug. 30.
“The call center will become more and more of a hub, from a pure inbound service center to taking a call, popping up information on computer screens, up-selling and cross-selling. The same concept also applies to field service professionals so the right technician can be dispatched to the right place at the right time. The call center will become more and more of an interaction center with paging, faxing, e-mail. That’s why GM is building Web sites and Amazon.com is building call centers,” he said.
“You also want to run this mobile, with pervasive computing on WAP-enabled phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants). … One of the biggest stumbling blocks is access to support channels through multiple devices.”
Siebel, which counts British Telecommunications plc, Nokia Corp., IBM Corp. and General Motors Corp. among its customers, is the largest electronic business application software provider in the world, he said. Its annual revenues today are about $1.5 billion in a $6.6 billion marketplace that is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 54 percent.
“We have gone from asking whether it works to asking if it’s scalable to asking if there is a measurable effect,” Schmaier said.
“The projects we are involved in today with IBM, GM and Nokia are measuring changes in customer satisfaction and wallet size.”
The e-business revolution began just seven years ago with two separate tracks, sales-force automation and customer service and support. These databases and customer interaction tools then converged into customer relationship management. In the late 1990s, corporate marketing departments became involved as they sought to mine the sales and customer service information. The Internet is taking the e-business revolution to its next step.
“The advent of the Web, or e-CRM, has gone from e-commerce for sales without customer service to real-time collaboration with call centers, or e-customer service. Now, there are millions of Web sites and no one at them, so the issue is how to drive people to the sites,” Schmaier said.
In the longer run, the e-business distribution model will promote several significant changes in the way companies conduct commerce. It will allow businesses to share important information with their multiple sales channels and suppliers.
It will permit products to be tailored to end users and enable auction-style bidding by customers. Schmaier said he believes it could become typical for consumers to comparison shop and configure for personal use online, then buy by phone or in person.
The new e-business model also will permit all entities involved in ultimate sales to get reliable feedback about what kinds of marketing techniques, be they trade shows, print advertising or e-mail alerts, work most effectively and with whom.
“It would be much simpler if we could have one integrated foundation system, but I think there will be more industry-specific models,” he said.
“Telcos, for example, see churn and fraud as critically important, while pharmaceutical companies’ priority is to ship product samples to doctors.”
