REFERENCE CHANNELS

Book Review: Customers.com
by Patricia Seybold

I wanted to LIKE this book. Instead, I'm impressed by it. Customers.com is one of the hot business books these days, especially if you're in an Internet business. It contains great information but is not an easy read.

Patricia Seybold is one of the recognized authorities on e-business. Her business, the Patricia Seybold Group, advises a "Who's Who" roster of world class businesses, including Ameritech, Arthur Andersen, Clorox, Hewlett Packard, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, State Street Bank and Warburg Pincus. The book is meaty with information and analysis, carrying a lot of weight amid a format that strongly reminded me of case analysis back when I was in business school. I kept expecting a professor to pop up and engage me in a pointed conversation to see if I had "gotten" it.

So, is this a book that can help a small business? Yes. The book is well laid out with two primary sections. The first one deals with five steps to success in electronic commerce. They're good and very applicable to our small businesses. Step One is "Make It Easy For the Customer To Deal With You," an excellent idea no matter what your business is. And Seybold makes the point that, in order to be successful, business has to look at all of the ways that customers interact with them. Instead of parceling functions off to individual departments, the businesses that are going to profit most from the new uses of information technologies will make it easy for their customers. It may be expensive and difficult to change the way things have always been done. Once done, however, your cost of doing business will go down, work will flow more smoothly from one functional area to the next and each individual account will become more profitable. And each improvement to your site will become easier to use with the systems that you've already adapted to provide better services for your customers.

The second section of the book deals with eight critical success factors and case studies to illustrate each of them. Once again, Seybold picks the right lessons for us to learn. The first CSF is to target the right customer. Illustrated with cases about American Airlines and National Semiconductor, we get to examine the steps that will help businesses find out who is their customer. (It's not always the one who places the order or pays the bills!) After each of the cases, there's a section of "Take-Aways" from each. This is the heart of the book, with information that we can really use in our small businesses. Other CSFs that had great value for our business are "Let Customers Help Themselves" and "Foster Community." We know that these are applicable to our business.

What else would I have liked to see in this book? Obviously, most of the cases are geared to big businesses, like Hertz, Amazon.com and General Motors. Still, Seybold managed to include the smaller iPrint -- which looks like a great place for small businesses to order business cards from -- and PhotoDisc. The book could have been stronger had a couple of the case studies been situations where the company fell short on achieving its e-commerce goals. There is much to be learned from things that don't quite go right. Finally, I would have liked to look at what has been done with strongly limited resources, a situation under which most small businesses operate.

As I said, this book is not an easy read but it is valuable. Don't expect to sit down and breeze through it like a novel. Instead, keep it in hand's reach and use it as a reference manual because you'll find yourself going back to it repeatedly as you work on improving your customers' experiences and your business' profitability.

ABC's Rating: $$$

-Cindy Nemeth-Johannes

ABC's book rating system: $ - A few useful items; $$ - Some good content; $$$ - Well balanced and worthwhile; $$$$ - Recommend highly; $$$$$ - Excellent! Buy it now

Buy it now!