Separating the good customer relationship management applications from the not-so-good applications is generally very simple. A product has to be easy to use, intuitive to use, and it has to be available when you need it. No matter how you slice it, if it’s not easy to use and not available where it's needed and when it's needed, then it’s not going to work. That's the whole secret. New technologies have greatly impacted these basic principles of CRM application success.

I have been in the business for more than 18 years and feel the Internet has made CRM really effective because it is easy to deploy and use. But, while the Internet has improved CRM, I think that it has also screwed up the “local business advantage” because each customer has access to a world of information and options. This translates into a far more efficient market, where people know who has what at what price. Price, geography, and market inefficiencies are no longer issues to deal with. The real focus is on customer satisfaction, which means that you are going to have to serve your customers if you are to compete.

One of the biggest changes in the CRM field right now is the advent of the new tablet PC and the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). If you're going to be a customer intimate company, you have to have the details on hand. We’ve seen, however, that in the past, no one would use a standard PC or laptop in front of a customer because it was unnatural; the rep couldn't type fast enough, he was distracted, he wanted to look them in the eyes, and therefore, he usually wanted to take handwritten notes. Information really wasn't captured in the step that it should have been. The new convertible tablet PCs are a tremendous help. You can, in fact, use them in meetings because they allow you to take free-form notes.

There is an 80/20 rule that says 20 percent of the people will use the handwritten recognition properly, while 80 percent will just scribble on a pad, but that’s what they would be doing anyhow. So, we now have character capture versus character recognition. I believe with the easy-touse character capture, the people will use it to attach those notes to the customer with whom they're talking. We have improved the salesperson’s efficiency, because the notes are in their proper location. Twenty percent of people will do the handwriting to text translations. But 80 percent of the time, people will expect them to have captured the notes, which is how we have been doing business. The current generation of these devices is going to replace the pen and paper. And that's pretty powerful.

Major changes are often realized by reaching tipping points. This is where something is good, but when you add it to something else, it gets that much better and it just takes over. Case in point, we can think back to the digital Rolodex. They did not really take off until the Palm Operating System was developed and put to use. Palm gave us a calendar and the personal digital assistant with all of our names and addresses. More importantly, they decided to sync it with our e-mail system. Palm would not have worked without e-mail. E-mail caused people to create databases on their personal computer. Because they had those names and addresses in the personal computer, Palm’s secret was to link this information into the little device, and people realized that they could have the calendar, with all of these names and addresses whenever they need them. Furthermore, everybody realized that if you ever had the discipline to put all of that information into the digital Rolodexes, one day the battery crashed or it got rolled over by a chair and you lost everything. Then you realized the same thing could happen with your notebook computer. But, since you can easily synchronize it to your Palm device, the Palm device and my notebook back each other up on key information.

Then PDAs really started getting legs under them when they came out with the phone attached. When you call me, I recognize your phone number because it brings up your name. When I call you, I can look up your name and press “dial” and I don’t have to dial the number. Convergent devices are powerful in terms of having information at your fingertips; plus they're always on, which is a main reason why the notebooks are not used. So, you can scribble the handwritten notes of the sales meeting, which is very good, and you don't have to recast them except to attach them. It's no different than what would happen before, but now it's all organized and you take better notes, because the notes are where you need them when you need them.

Another technology tipping point that will change how we work is WiFi, or Wireless Fidelity, which is basically a wireless local area network. You can enter a Starbucks, for example, and pay a couple of dollars and have high-speed Internet access if you have a WiFi card in your PC. Most of the PCs today are shipping with WiFi in the computer as an added benefit. You can pay a few dollars at airports, and have access to it, and you can have WiFi in more and more hotels and other venues.

If your office has WiFi capabilities, I can walk into your office and begin working on a virtual private network from my home office and have total network security while accessing sensitive information such as my e- mail. Furthermore, I can now work flexibly with my customers by being able to perform such activities as checking the status of their account receivables or their inventory, in a manner which is convenient and time- efficient.

The data, which is important in the relationship, is the next step. It's all about the workload and information going back and forth. Information lubricates a good relationship. In the near future, you're going to start to use your notebook, because you're using it in the meeting itself to scribble your notes. You're capturing your notes in real-time; you’ve also already put this information in your enterprise database because you’re using your customer’s WiFi connection to do all of this in the background. This is big medicine; it’s a big change. Also, if you take the right enabling technology, you can comprehensively view a customer and all the pertinent data that affects both your business and theirs. In this view, you can bring up accounts receivable, which might be in Chicago. Or you might need to access the mainframe in Miami, which has all of the maintenance information. The orders are kept in an Oracle database in Oregon, and your sales are kept in a database in Seattle. Basically, you can bring up a composite screen in front of the customer in real-time view of all these disparate data sources. You can see the back orders, things that just happened, and the current status. A whole bunch of enabling technologies are dramatically changing the way we do business.

To take the success of these technologies further, I think you have to focus on customization capabilities so these technologies can better fit their needs. CRM technologies have to be easy to customize and easy to use. That's the answer. If it is easy to customize and easy to use, everything else will take care of itself.