As the customer interaction industry moved from sales force automation in the early 1990s to e-business today, distribution details ironed out in country club lounges and golf courses between marketers and distributors are now being determined by customers, according to Thomas M. Siebel.
In his presentation, “Demand Chain Management: eBusiness Channel Dynamics,” Siebel, chairman and CEO of San Mateo, CA-based Siebel Systems Inc., outlined the changes companies face when moving from basic customer service systems to interactive communication with and distribution to their customers.
Customers, according to Siebel, appreciate being freed from having to do business on the terms of a marketer. In the past, vendors put a picture of a desired good or service in front of their potential market. Customers could then choose how to acquire what they wanted — provided they went to a retail outlet between nine o’clock and five o’clock, Mondays through Saturdays, Siebel said.
But the explosion of multichannel distribution allows customers to determine when and how they want to get information or make purchases. This goes beyond providing additional channels to receive information: Customers now expect to carry on a continuous dialog while switching channels, and they do not want to backtrack over previously volunteered information with each new contact.
At the same time, the discussion regarding how to best manage the “demand chain” has moved from the provenance of information technology departments to board-level discussions. “In the past decade, the job of the chief information officer was to keep people like me from people like [board members],” said Siebel. “Now there is a conviction that unless they understand this they will not survive in the marketplace.”
The rise of direct interaction has also caused another metric — customer satisfaction — to gain importance in a company’s reckonings, joining return on investment and market share as considerations, Siebel continued.
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