5. Commercial contact management and sales

On a basic commercial websites, customer management problems are reduced to coping with orders and e-mails. As soon as a website starts to generate a substantial number of visitors, the amount of requests for information increases. As you know, you must answer an internaut's questions quickly, which is what the average internaut expects. This takes a huge amount of time and is extremely difficult to plan and allow time for.

But the more sophisticated e-business systems demand a personalised relationship, from the first welcome to the internaut on the site to the sale and after-sale. When tens of thousands of people visit a site, the technical structure of the site has to be reconsidered.

Broadvision's approach, even though it may not address all the problems, is full of lessons to be learnt. Usually, when you plan a website, you create broad categories (catalogue, advertising, news, contact, company presentation, after-sales service ...) and you define, page after page, the content of each heading. The concept of personalisation calls into question this whole concept. When you visit a site created by Broadvision, the server starts up a system which decides the content of the pages which will be created by each specific visitor. You can decide on the contents of each page, which will be created within a certain set of rules. Five types of rules exist : events, profile, function rules, system rules and community rules. The webmaster can thus decide to modify the content of the page which appears according to different events (the visitor has already visited three times), a declared characteristic of the visitor (over 25 years old) or his membership of a community (which is defined in this precise system by the number of individuals who respond to certain precise criteria).

The variable elements in the page on view are the editorial content, the nature of products on offer, personalised promotions, discussion forums and advertising. Thus even the commercial dialogue is personalised.

7. Chain sales

The virtual economy's business approach is not limited to selling your own products : once you have established a quality business relationship with a customer, the idea is to discover the world of his needs little by little, and to suggest to him your partners' commercials services. This is the principle of chain or cross-selling. You partners would obviously pay you commission.

8. Production

At the beginning of the sales phase, a traditional salesman checks his stock to see whether the product is available, and endorses the order. A digital butterfly, on the other hand, avoids being weighed down by stock, and orders the required goods in real time, according to the orders he receives. This is the process adopted by Dell, which has integrated its suppliers in an extranet, to ensure constant communication between its shop (front office) and storeroom (back office). Sales and production are integrated in a continuous process. Some digital butterflies takes this procedure even further, such as Levi's who, since 1995, started a system of made-to-measure jeans for its customers. The additional cost of this decision is worthwhile, because only 12% of normal customers renew their order, whereas with personalised jeans the figure is 38%. In addition, making to order solves another problem faced by textile manufacturers : that of unsold stock, due to a wrong choice of sizes or models. Levi's now offers this service to all its customers, who can order made-to-measure jeans in all its shops in the United States by giving their measurements. For each of 30 different models, 49,500 different sizes exist, giving a total number of combinations around 1.5 million. The customer's wishes are sent by modem to the production workshop, which delivers the garment to the shop within two to three weeks, at the relatively competitive price of $55 (although higher than normal ready-to-wear clothes). Levi's forecast that 25% of its sales will be personalised within less than 5 years.

AOL, the Internet access provider, carries the idea of personalisation even further, to the point of involving the client in the service on offer. The client can create his own product. The theory of hidden marketing comes to the same thing as one-to-one marketing : the more a client invests in personalising his relationship with a supplier, the more faithful he will be.

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