March 1999

Extranets Enhance Customer Self-Service

BY LEW SHEPHERDSON

Creating competitive advantage by providing exceptional customer service has been a solid business strategy since the dawn of commerce. Customer service builds upon a foundation of information about the customer: their business requirements; their past interactions; their outstanding orders, payments, or problems; and innumerable other fragments of data. For the past 30 years or so, organizations have harnessed computer technology to manage customer information, allowing employees to create, retrieve, and update customer information. Today, the Internet has become the preferred channel for customer service, freeing customers from their dependence upon employee intermediaries. The ultimate in customer service is now available using only a PC and the Web, and customers increasingly want to obtain current status information, review and modify contact data, and perform other tasks remotely. In short, anything that can be done over a counter or over the phone, customers want to be able to do for themselves via the Web.

This trend has major implications for customer support organizations. On the positive side, they already have in place all of the applications that retrieve, update, and create customer information. The applications are there, they work, and they are being used every day by customer service and call center agents. However, organizations need a way to integrate the information content and functionality of the existing systems and make this information available as usable, secure, self-service Web applications.

Extranets are an ideal way to transform an organization's wealth of "employee facing" systems (using the terminology of John Landry, industry guru and Internet consultant to IBM) into "market facing" systems that can be used directly by customers. Extranets can accomplish this transformation using a tiered architecture that allows customers with Web browsers to interact with a customer-oriented, self-service application, which in turn relies on customized business logic to direct its interaction with the multitude of back-end databases and existing applications.

EXTRANET REQUIREMENTS: A Three-Tiered Approach
Extranets built around a three-tier architecture (browser, extranet server, back-end systems) are well suited to eliminate the major obstacles between customers and the information they want.

Connectivity: This is the most obvious requirement. There must be connectivity between the back-end systems in order to assemble all of the needed information within the extranet server. Typically this requires access to various kinds of databases (e.g., DB2, Oracle, Sybase) and programmed terminal sessions with mainframe or midrange applications (e.g., CICS, IMS transactions). Ideally the extranet server offers a data abstraction capability that normalizes the information into a common form, regardless of where it originated.

This approach treats the back-end systems as giant sources of "For Server Use Only" data and functionality. In contrast, many browser-based connectivity products attempt to directly force-fit the employee-oriented functionality and content of the back-end systems into something that customers can understand and use. They rarely succeed.

Customer-oriented user interface: A customer who wants service delivered over the Internet is already comfortable and familiar with using Web applications and expects a Web-centric interface. The extranet server architecture allows organizations to separate the user interface from all the constraints of the employee-oriented back-end systems and create an application oriented to the customer's needs. The Web application can "speak" the customer's language, completely independent of the typically acronym-filled, jargon-laden interfaces of the existing systems.

Integration: However, the real key to making the extranet server work effectively is the integration capability in the middle. This is where the nuggets of data from all the different sources can be integrated into a single coherent view, where information flow can be coordinated between disparate applications that were never designed to work together, and where single events such as updating an address can spawn multiple processes to ensure the change is propagated to all the appropriate databases and applications.

An effective extranet server must allow new business logic to be applied to the information flowing between the customer and the back-end systems. Many traditional connectivity and middleware products are passive - they can only change the form of information as it passes through. An extranet server needs to be active - dynamically making decisions, applying business rules, enforcing security, and choreographing the involvement of the back-end systems.

THE NEED FOR BUSINESS LOGIC
It is the business logic capabilities of extranet servers that enable organizations to meet the primary needs of customer service applications, both from the organization's perspective and from the customer's perspective. The customer's needs are straightforward:

• Customers want "one-stop shopping." Whether they are updating some administrative information, looking for technical information to solve a problem, requesting a follow-up action, or entering an order or a problem report, customers want to go to a central Web site for all interactions with the organization. Whether it is actually implemented as a single application or as multiple Web sites is immaterial; the key is that the extranet server has the logic to figure out how to provide what the customer wants to do.
• Customers want all of their personal information to be available in one place. Customers really don't care that the organization might have accounting information in one place, support-related information in another place, and marketing data in a third. They don't want to have to go to multiple applications, or to have different versions of their information showing up on different pages. Whatever key is used to identify the customer - an account number, a user ID, a product serial number - it needs to lead to a consistent set of information. Business logic is essential to dynamically building an information profile from the various pieces found in the different back-end systems.
• Customers want to be able to update their own information. Addresses, telephone numbers, product options, designated contacts - if the customer is allowed to change it, they want to be able to make the change online. Here again, dynamic business logic is the enabling technology that ensures only authorized changes are made, that ensures integrity by updating the information in the back-end systems, and that can provide customers with verification that the changes have indeed been made.

Extranets can meet the organization's needs and present some important opportunities for organizations to:

Simplify architectures: The three-tier extranet architecture is simple, and it works because it can leverage all of the complex processing that already exists in the back-end systems. The business logic capabilities of the extranet server are focused on coordinating and interacting with both the customer end user and the back-end systems, not in replicating the business rules and processing that are already contained in those systems.

Manage change: Any application that depends upon the behavior or structure of another system may require modification if the underlying system is changed. If the interactions with other systems are firmly embedded within a front-end application, a sequence of unrelated alterations to the underlying systems can soon mire the application in a jumble of changes. This makes it very difficult to verify that the application still works correctly. The changes can be much more effectively managed if each interaction with another system is carefully isolated from the others. This is a major advantage of extranet servers with data abstraction capabilities that effectively encapsulate each interaction with a back-end system.

Gather customer intelligence: This information can then be integrated into other business processes. For example, a customer repeatedly browsing information about a product that they don't already have installed may indicate a sales opportunity that can be fed into a marketing follow-up system. Or tracking the number of hits on each question in a FAQ list can help determine the appropriate changes to packaging or installation instructions. Or the problem-tracking system can automatically send a customer an e-mail with a direct link to a high-priority product fix they should install. All of these opportunities can be enabled by an extranet server that has strong business logic capabilities.

CONCLUSION
The Internet is changing the way customers research products and make buying decisions. Increasingly, customers are looking for suppliers who are Internet-enabled for purchases as well as for customer self-service. As more and more selling processes are conducted via the Internet, the importance of customer service as the primary "relationship builder" between supplier and customer will continue to grow. Smart organizations are complementing the systems already in place with extranet technology to provide exceptional customer service over the Internet.

Lew Shepherdson is the director of strategic technology at Simware, Inc., the Ottawa, Ontario-based provider of Salvo, the Enterprise-to-Extranet Solution. For more information, contact the company at 800-267-9991, or visit their Web site at www.simware.com.