Adventures in Polymerland

Moving customers onto the Web has also served Polymerland's bottom line nicely. GE estimates that online transactions save the company three to four cents on every dollar, compared with purchases that go through traditional channels -- in part because more than 75% of online orders require no human intervention and go directly to a warehouse. (Other GE businesses have achieved, or hope to achieve, equally impressive savings: GE Appliances, for example, has reduced its cost per interaction from $5 to 20 cents by getting people to go to its Web site instead of calling a phone-service rep. The division handles 20 million calls a year. "Do the math," says Gary Reiner, 45, GE's chief information officer. "That's powerful.")

Yet there was more than cost cutting at work here: The folks at Polymerland discovered that their customers were actually grooving on the experience of using the Web. Barbara Thewlis remembers a call to one customer, who represented a small account. "He said, 'I'm just a one-man company. I don't think I can do this, and I really don't want to try,' " she recalls. "I said, 'I'll tell you what. I've got all the time in the world for you right now. I'll walk you through this step-by-step. I'll even tell you where to type in the URL.' Now he uses our Web site all the time."

Hank Harrell recalls the moment when he knew that "this Web stuff" was going somewhere. Sometime last year, during an upgrade of the site, his team altered the order-entry screens. Eager to avoid alarming customers who were already regular users, the team sent out an email that outlined the change. Within minutes, about 20 customers had logged on to check out the new look. Several of them then clicked on the site's "Feedback" button to put in their two cents.

Harrell was amazed by how quickly those customers responded. "They were listening to us. They trusted what we had done, and they were giving us their time and attention. They were showing loyalty toward us," he says. "That's when I realized that reaching our customers through the Internet could be more personal than using other channels.

"The great thing about the Net is that it makes it easy for people to be responsive," Harrell continues. "There were times when we were able to make changes to the site within hours of when customers had made those requests. We were able to respond to customers personally. All of a sudden, they saw real people on our end, rather than a black box where they faxed or mailed or phoned in orders."

Before Jack Knew Jack

Late last year, Foss was invited to a best-practices meeting in Fairfield, Connecticut, along with Jack Welch and a handful of other business-unit leaders from GE. Welch had become captivated by the Internet, and he wanted to ramp up GE's activity. Foss was asked to talk about Polymerland's site. "When you walk into a session like that, you're not sure what you're in for," Foss says. "But it was great. The setup was 'Okay, guys, let's go around the room. Everybody get online, and let's go through each Web site. Let's show people where you've been innovating, where you've made enhancements recently, where you'll be going next.' And we spent five hours going through all of the sites."

Foss's demo drew rave reviews. Welch began emailing Foss every week, asking for sales figures and other updates. And as Welch increased the intensity of GE's e-commerce agenda, the internal scrutiny on Polymerland increased as well. "Once Jack highlights you as a best practice, your phone starts ringing off the hook," Harrell says. "We've taken just about every business unit in GE through our presentation on what we've learned so far."

But the Polymerland site still had kinks to smooth out. That's what happens when you translate a dirt-world business to the online ether: Long-established business practices can cause problems when they intersect with the world of the Web. Traditionally, for example, when schedulers at GE warehouses needed to log a shipment into the system, they would use the last date of the year as a flag, figuring that they could insert the right information later. As a result, when the Polymerland Web site went live, customers saw shipping dates that were months past the dates that they had requested. Ensuring that information was accurate turned out to be less about fine-tuning computer systems than about changing human behavior.

"If it were just about putting up a nice site, any competitor could match us," says Mark Rohrwasser, 36, leader of Polymerland's customer Web center. "But there's more to it than that. You must radically change the way you do business. That's the barrier to entry: How quickly can you do that?"