Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

218 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING
shifting much of the repetitive person-to-person contact to Internetbased
communications.
There are also out-of-the-box extranet solutions that smaller b-to-b
companies can take advantage of, such as Intranets.com (www.
intranets.com). Intranets.com offers a set of free services that allow you
to establish private spaces where you can collaborate and communicate
with external audiences.
Even if you believe in the value of a customer-driven extranet, where
do you begin? Maybe it is obvious—but it all starts with what your
customers want and need. As mentioned earlier, asking your customers
what they want—and giving it to them—should be the driving force
behind an extranet. Using database technology, you can accumulate profile
data about each customer’s relationship with your company, track
the customer’s interactions with you, and use this data to individualize
communications with the customer. In addition, you can learn what
customers might want built into an extranet to best meet their needs.
Internet-based customer service requires consideration of new forms
of data. For example, transaction data is different from online interaction
data. The customer’s transactions represent the inquiries or orders
you receive. Analyzing this data will help you understand a customer’s
need for information or buying pattern. But interaction data can offer
insight into online behavior. This is the data that tells you how often
customers access your Web site, which pages they access most, how
they navigate the site, and so on.
You can also bring together product data with solutions and applications
information and what-if scenarios so that customers can interactively
learn how products apply to their specific needs or how to solve
problems with your products. The MathWorks (www.mathworks.com),
mentioned earlier, is a good example of this. The company built a database
of over 10,000 cases so that customers could solve their own problems
online. This concept—using database-driven Web technology to
deliver voluminous information of value that helps customers solve their
own problems—is an increasingly common practice among b-to-b companies.
The added benefit is in the fact that time-intensive customer
interactions can be dramatically reduced.
Solutions-oriented content as part of an extranet is at once the most
challenging and most exciting opportunity for both company and customer.
Imagine, for example, a customer solutions extranet for your
organization. It could take the form of a searchable database that cross-