Customer's Choice: A Person or a Page

Taking care of customers is as old as commerce itself, but information technology offers new ways of going about it. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is one of the hottest areas for growth in business technology.

Says Cassandra Millhouse, lead analyst for the technology consultancy Ovum: ''CRM doesn't sound very different from good old-fashioned sales practices. It is an approach to increasing profits by focusing on the customer.''

What is new is the way CRM makes use of a full suite of applications to achieve its aim. In a complete CRM solution, the information that flows among an organization's customers and its sales force, field engineers or support staff, Web site, direct-mail division and call centers is captured to provide a consistent and complete view of customers.

This ''holistic'' picture allows companies to attract and maximize the value of customers in new ways.

What companies are getting for their money may not be as holistic as promised, however. A recent study from the market researcher Dataquest Inc., a unit of Gartner Group Inc., suggests that 75 percent of CRM solutions today are actually old (three to five years) computer-telephony integration (CTI) applications.

CTI is used in call centers to help manage customer interactions efficiently, says Ben Pring, an analyst for the Gartner Group.

A more advanced application, still in development, is the ''Web-enabled'' call center.

A customer might consult an insurance company's home page on the Internet because she is interested in a policy, but wants more information.

Clicking on a button initiates a vocal session with an agent at the company's call center. There is no need for a second phone line; the conversation takes place on the computer line.

The customer poses questions to the agent, who appears on the screen. Together, the customer and the agent can examine various policies and charts, and the call center can send additional material if needed.

The advantages for the company: immediate contact with a sales prospect and reduced inquiry-processing time, for which the conversion rate to a sale is much greater.

Advantages for the user: no need to turn off the computer to make a separate phone call, plus more information when you want it, where you want it, with voice and text combined.

Claudia Flisi