360-Degree Customer Care

Store your data in one place.

Most companies, Siebel notes, have allowed customer data to become incredibly fragmented over the years. Billing departments, marketing divisions, and service centers all may know a bit about the same customer, but companies have no effective way to tie that knowledge together.

Those discontinuities are likely to sound grimly familiar to anyone who has bought or serviced a car recently. But Siebel is optimistic about a $300 million initiative being undertaken by Saturn Corp., which he calls "an emerging eBusiness leader in the automotive industry." Saturn is creating a Web-based information system that will link all 400 of its retail facilities nationwide with each other and with customers and partners. That should make it easier for car buyers to canvas multiple dealerships in search of their exact model choice; it also should help owners schedule service appointments no matter where they are.

Get relevant data to your frontline workers as fast as possible.

The biggest users of Siebel software are regional sales reps on per diems and call-center specialists who wear headsets all day long. Their jobs may not be as glamorous as a CEO's -- but to Siebel Systems, they are crucial to a company's success. And the only way for those employees to reach maximum effectiveness is to put knowledge on their screens and in their hands.

Siebel approvingly cites computer and telephony integration at the global-accounts call center for WorldCom, the long-distance and Internet-services company. The system "ensures that a customer's complete account profile automatically appears on screen before an agent takes a call," he says. That avoids exasperating -- and unproductive -- calls where call-center agents struggle to track down relevant information. Instead, that approach should let agents anticipate customers' needs, handling calls faster and more effectively.

Go the extra mile for your best customers.

It sounds obvious, but as Siebel notes, too many businesses don't even know how to identify their best customers. Revenue is part of the story, and that's easy to track. But the real key is customers' contribution to profit margins. And that requires a much more sophisticated analysis that looks at the actual mix of business coming from each customer, plus adjustments for returns, repairs, and unexpected custom adaptations.

Once that analysis is in, it's time to maximize those key accounts' potential. Siebel writes approvingly of the Gold Service program that IBM extends to several hundred of its top enterprise customers. Those key accounts get their own telesales and telecoverage teams, ensuring "a consistent point of entry into IBM's breadth of offerings." And that "has made IBM an easier company with which to do business."

And as Siebel bluntly notes, "Not all of an organization's customers are desirable." His advice: Either create a profitable, new offering for otherwise low-value customers, or avoid acquiring them in the first place.

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor.