Our book Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet & Beyond was first published in 1998. The original book, now called Customers.com Classic, still offers timeless insights and wonderful case histories of companies’ early Internet initiatives. Successful online ventures have one key attribute in common that is neither new nor peculiar to Internet initiative: A successful e-business initiative makes it easy for customers and prospects to do business with you. This sounds simple, but it is very difficult in practice. In Customers.com Classic, we identified eight critical factors that still characterize successful e-business initiatives.

When you tackle your own Customers.com® initiative—whether you want to make it easy for customers to do business with you via the Web or using mobile technologies—you should start by assessing where you stand on these eight fundamental core competencies. In this first section of the revised Customers.com Handbook we recap and update the eight original success factors and offer some questions you can ask yourself to make sure that you’ve covered the bases in designing and refining your customer-centric online and/or mobile strategy.

Is Your Organization Interacting with Customers Online?

Every time you interact with your customers using electronic technologies—text messaging, electronic mail, publishing applications for smart phones, letting customers help themselves via the Internet, optimizing online search, interacting with clients via social media, planning email marketing campaigns, you’re engaging in e-business. In fact, many people would say that e-business IS business. It’s how organizations operate today in a world in which almost everyone is connected via the Internet and mobile, wireless technologies and most information is available in digital form.

Streamlining Customer Interactions

Even back in 1998, when Customers.com was first published, e-business wasn’t limited to shopping over the Internet. It was also not confined to supply-chain transactions between large trading partners. E-business still means doing business electronically—all of the aspects of doing business. It embodies the total business process—from advertising and marketing to sales, ordering, manufacturing, distribution, customer service, and after-sales support—helping businesses manage their entire customer and product life cycles.

When we engage in e-business, we’re applying today’s technologies to streamline our business interactions. Those technologies include the Internet, but they also include smart phones, hand-held digital appliances, interactive TVs, self-service kiosks, smart cards, electronic sensors that monitor all elements of our physical world, and a whole host of emerging technologies. All of these customer-impacting and customer-facing technologies are supported behind the scenes by integrated customer databases, call centers, streamlined workflows, and secure transactional systems. They require systems to talk to one another—seamlessly, reliably, and securely—across company boundaries, geographic boundaries, and time zones.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? How do you get it right? The real secret of success in e-business revolves around customers. A successful strategy involves building and sustaining business relationships with customers electronically, using digital tools to make it easy for customers to do business with you, easy for them to get things done, and easy for the people in your firm and in the rest of your customers’ ecosystem to coordinate. You e-business strategy should also enable you to detect customers’ needs before they have been able to articulate them, to anticipate what new capabilities your current and new customers will value, and, ideally, to collaborate with insightful clients in co-designing new win/win solutions.

First, we summarize the eight critical success factors described in the original Customers.com, which we now call Customers.com Classic. These are still the basic competencies you’ll need to master. Second, we offer a road map to help you deal with the hardest set of issues—building consensus within your organization. Third, we offer a road map and an approach that your technology team can follow to identify and to map customer-critical business processes into a technical architecture.

Eight Critical Success Factors for Customers.com® Initiatives

The lifetime value of your customers will increase in direct proportion to how easy you can make it for them to do business with you. There are eight organizational behaviors that make doing business with you easy and attractive.

The Concept

In looking for best practices in Web-based electronic business initiatives over the past 12 years, we’ve discovered that all of the successful ventures have one key attribute in common: They make it easy for their customers and prospects to do business with them both online and offline.

The Eight Critical Success Factors

In analyzing how organizations deliver on this promise of making it easy to do business, we distilled eight critical success factors. They are:

1. Target the right customers

2. Own the customer’s total experience

3. Streamline business processes that impact the customer

4. Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship

5. Let customers help themselves

6. Help customers do their jobs

7. Deliver personalized service

8. Foster community

You’ll notice that the critical success factors tend to build on one another. If you do a good job with one, chances are you’re making progress on at least two more. Now let’s take a closer look at each one.