e-business has made it possible to give more personalized customer service than ever before. And your customers know it. That is why they want access to your company, 24 hours a day. They want to know when their orders were shipped. They want to know their account balances. They want salespeople and clerks and call center reps who can answer their questions now, and they will not settle for anything else. And they do not have to. Customers today have more options than ever before.

So, how do you encourage customer loyalty without sacrificing profitability? By leveraging the Web to not only meet their customer service expectations, but exceed them.

The benefits of Web-enabled solutions are far-reaching and powerful. Typically, the ability to give your customers exactly the information they want, when they want it, comes to mind first. That is e-commerce service. But you can do much more than that. You can:

• Establish an ongoing dialogue with your customers: Use the Web to communicate directly with your customers. Let them get the answers they want, when they want.
• Gain a better understanding of your customers' needs: Recognizing customer preferences and buying patterns allows you to build individual customer solutions across all of your business channels and divisions, as well as cross-sell and up-sell.
• Produce more efficient marketing efforts: Apply accurate, readily accessible customer information for more precise targeting.
• Anticipate what your customers are looking for: Reach a new level of service by offering your customers the information and services they want before they even know they want them.
• Link your various departments and divisions, seamlessly: Give your call center, your sales force and every other department in your organization access to the data customers want, updated in real time.
• Speak to customers in a consistent voice across your organization: Employ a consolidated customer service strategy at every point of contact and your customers will see you as you want them to see you: a unified entity.

The idea is to give people a consistently better experience at every point of contact within your business. At the same time, your business will realize important improvements to your internal processes, such as:

• Integrating legacy and IT systems to streamline access to real-time database input and output.
• Providing customer sales and marketing data with higher levels of accuracy and efficiency.
• Reducing the sales cycle by adjusting levels of service to maximize return on investment.

Better customer service means long-term loyalty and, ultimately, higher margins. In addition, it may actually reduce your overall business costs. As is widely known, it costs one-sixth less to keep a current customer than it does to attract a new one.