John Linton
...but one major benefit is seldom used by more than a tiny percentage of commercial enterprises.
There are very few really important people associated with the communications industry but this brief article reminds us that the inventor of hte internet (no, not Al Gore) is one of them:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/280233/hurrah_berners-lee_web_celebrates_20th_anniversary?fp=16&fpid=1
As someone involved in the communications industry for a very long time and who is now part of a communications company whose every service is internet based I have a somewhat distorted view of just how important the internet is in terms of operating a business in 2009 - less than 20 years since the 'first internet message' was sent. Exetel, of course, couldn't even exist without the internet and a web site that effectively runs every aspect of our business from initial contact through on line provisioning, payment, support, service change through to finalising the contract.
Apart from those multitudes of commercial 'miracles' wrought by the internet (some of the usual suspects are referred to in the referenced brief summary) one the most commonly overlooked benefits to our industry is the ability of the internet to provide instant and constant customer feed back on every aspect of the 'products' a company provides and every aspect of the services associated with that product and how they are provided.
Since we first put them up on our web site in January 2004 our customer forums have provided Exetel with almost 70% of the suggestions for changes we have made to the ways we operate Exetel and for additions to current services and suggestions for new services. Even when we come up with a new idea or a new service the constant feedback we get via the Exetel User forum always improves our base idea and continues to make it more useful. I have used this blog in the same way and Exetel is a better business today because of the suggestions made by readers over the past 21 months
Our newest customer feedback initiative (the 'suggestion box in the Exetel User Facilities) has been more successful than anything else we have done so far to generate improvements to the ways we operate with more than 150 suggestions being received in its first two weeks of operation over 30 of which have already been implemented and another 20 or so have been added to the 'to do' lists of different areas of Exetel for implementation in the near future.
50 ideas in two weeks that will improve many different aspects of how Exetel operates is an incredibly valuable source of 'free consulting advice' and while a cynic might say that it is just an indication of how badly Exetel is operated (which may be true) the fact remains that Exetel is being improved every day by suggestions that are being made by its customers and acted on by Exetel's management via its various software developers and other process builders in various areas of Exetel's operations.
Perhaps the 'novelty' will wear off and the number of suggestions will fall after this first flush of 'enthusiasm'. That may very well be the case but it hasn't been our experience with either this blog or the far longer running User Forum "suggestion threads" for support and sales which have, to date, been the main drivers for change and improvement within the company. Exetel's management very clearly understands that improvement suggestions that aren't acknowledged and then acted upon as quickly as possible are counter productive and we have been punctilious over the whole of our five years of having suggestion methods in place to acknowledge that we have received and will act on them (if we can) and then put them in place.
Our company is 'fortunate' in that our customers (partially because of the way we operate the business) visit our web site far more frequently than customers of, say, Ford or GM and of course we have a 'service' business that is infinitely easier to make changes to than an automobile that has a multi year development cycle. Irrespective of that 'immediacy' there remains the capability for any company to use its web site as an immediate feed back source for customers and prospective customers on every aspect of the way they operate their businesses yet very few that I visit seem to avail themselves of this incredibly valuable free consulting service. I have sometimes wondered why this is?
My suggestion, based on five years of first hand experiences, to any business that has a web site is to put in a 'customer forum' and a 'suggestion box' mechanism and have the forum moderated constantly and have the suggestions go to someone with the authority to action them. Exetel has built a $A50 million a year business almost solely based on its web site and the web site itself and all of the on line processes associated with it has constantly been improved via taking notice of customer suggestions.
I can't how any company's business wouldn't be constantly and immediately improved by implementing these extremely low cost suggestions - maybe the businesses that don't use constant customer feedback do everything perfectly?