Why transform to e-business?

Why go through the expense and energy of e-business transformation? Whether you are a traditional business or a dotcom, the faster your company can architect and build its e-business future, the more likely you will be able to stay ahead of the competition.

So if you think e-business can wait, think again. Tomorrow may be too late.

Traditional Business
To understand the dramatic changes that e-business demands of an organization, you must also understand three fundamental rules of the new economy:

The Fast Outrun the Slow
For the past fifty years, the tradition has been that big companies with lots of money and resources have been able to capture marketshare more effectively than small companies. Now the rules have all changed. In e-business, the fast outrun the slow. Size doesn't matter anymore. The only thing that matters is that your organization delivers personalized, quality products and services fast and cheap, and that you respond to changes in the marketplace quickly. The more streamlined and integrated your organization, the faster you are. It's that simple. E-business or out of business.

Foster Click Loyalty
Regardless of the industry you are in, today's market dictates that the customer is king. If a customer doesn't like your Web site or the products and services you provide, click....off to your competitor's site.

Current statistics show that it only takes 7 seconds to lose a customer—after 7 seconds, if they don't like what they see and what you offer, click...you lose them. Statistics also show that a customer will wait 45 seconds for an entire page to load. If the entire page has not loaded in 45 seconds, click...you lose them. The price is not right? Click...you lose them. This is why you have to always focus on the customer when developing Web sites, interaction channels, and products and services. No matter where you are in the value chain, no matter whether you're a business-to-business company or a business-to-consumer company, only as a true e-business can you foster click loyalty and survive in the internet economy.

Leverage Customer and Business Intelligence
The only way to foster click loyalty is to deliver personalized products and services better and faster than your competition. How can you keep track of what every customer wants and deliver it in internet time? E-business.

Only as an e-business can you capture the customer and business intelligence necessary to have a 360 degree view of your customers. How? By connecting all of your customer facing systems (i.e. Web store, call center, and direct sales team) to each other and to the applications that run your business. So, when a customer uses self service applications to enter an order through your Web store, the information they provide goes directly into the order entry system, to the direct sales force, to the call center, and to the supplier. At each and every touchpoint, you are gathering more and more information about your customer. This enables you to understand your customers better and develop one-to-one relationships that increase satisfaction and reduce defection.

Using self-service applications, there is obviously no need for an administrator between your customer, your suppliers, and your applications. This means that instead of wasting time entering data into the systems, your employees can focus on taking data out of the systems and using that data to understand your customer better—what they bought, what they didn't buy, what problems they are having, what services they've required, whether they've called consultants, whether they received their deliveries, etc. Your employees can use all of this information to sell more personalized products and services and to educate your customers.

Dotcom Business
Whether you are already a dotcom company or are about to become one, it's time to start thinking about becoming an e-business.

During the 1999 holiday season consumers logged on to the internet in record numbers. Millions of people flocked to the Web to buy their gifts. They placed millions of orders online, and the dotcoms accepted every one. However, this turned out to be a devastating mistake. In an embarrassing number of cases, customers did not receive their merchandise in time for the holidays. Why? Despite being Web-based companies, dotcoms are not e-businesses. Their demand chain and their supply chain were not integrated. As a result, the Web stores kept accepting customer orders long after the merchandise was out of stock.

So, let's ask the question again. Why become an e-business:

Only as an e-business can you integrate and streamline all of your systems. Your demand chain and your supply chain become one linked value chain—so your Web store, call center, enterprise applications, and suppliers are all connected. Once orders are received your suppliers can respond immediately, and you can keep your customers happy.

Thousands of dotcoms are already making the transition into e-business. How else do you plan on surviving the internet economy? How else are you going to foster click loyalty and take advantage of customer and business intelligence? In an economy where the fast outrun the slow, you don't have much of a choice.

Not convinced? As traditional businesses move their operations online your marketshare will be threatened at an increasing rate, whether you are a dotcom category leader or not. The new economy is changing the rules and you must fully understand what you are up against, online and off.